Checkpoint Charlie

Charlie’s Game

When I turned the corner I saw Leonard Ross going into Myerson’s office ahead of me. By the time I reached the door I heard Ross say, “Where’s Charlie?”

“Late. As usual. Shut the door.”

Late. As usual. As far as I could remember — and I have phenomenal recall — there had been only one time when I had been late arriving in Myerson’s office and that had been the result of a bomb scare that had grounded everything for three hours at Tempelhof. His acidulous remark had been a cheap shot. But then that was Myerson.

Ross was shutting the door in my face when I pushed in past him and kicked it closed. Ross said, “Hello, Mr. Dark.”

Myerson only glanced up from the desk. Then he went on pretending to read something in a manila file folder. I said, “Welcome back, Charlie,” in an effort to prompt him but he ignored it and I decided to play his silly game so I dropped my raincoat across a chair and squeezed into one of the tubular steel armchairs and perused the photos on the wall, waiting him out.

The room was stale with Myerson’s illegal Havana smoke; it was a room that obviously was unnerving to youngsters like Leonard Ross because among Myerson’s varied and indeterminate functions was that of hatchet man. Any audience with him might turn out to be one’s last: fall into disfavor with him and one could have a can tied to one’s tail at any time, Civil Service or no Civil Service; and as junior staff, Ross had no illusions about his right to tenure. I had none myself: I was there solely at Myerson’s sufferance, but that was something else — he could fire me any time he chose to but he was never going to choose to because he needed me too much and he knew it.

His rudeness meant nothing; that was what passed for amiability with Myerson. I gave Ross a glance and switched it meaningfully toward a chair and finally Ross sat down, perching uneasily on the edge of it.

The view from Myerson’s window isn’t terribly impressive. An enormous parking lot and, beyond it, a hedgerow of half-wilted trees. Here and there you can see the tops of the high-rises around Langley.

Finally he closed the file and looked at me. “You’re late.”

“Would you care for a note from my mother explaining my tardiness?”

“Your sarcasms seldom amuse me.”

“Then don’t provoke them.” pattern over Dulles.”

“You are,” he said, “preposterously fat.”

“And you are a master of the non sequitur.”

“You disgust me, do you know that?” He turned to young Ross. “He disgusts me. Doesn’t he disgust you?”

Ross made embarrassed gestures and I said, “Don’t put the kid on the spot. What’s on?”

Myerson wasn’t in a particularly savage mood, obviously, because he gave up trying to goad me with no more prompting than that. He tapped the manila folder with a fingertip. “We’ve got a signal from Arbuckle.”

“Where’s Arbuckle?”

“East Africa. You really ought to try to keep up on the postings in your own department.”

Ross explained to me, “Arbuckle’s in Dar-es-Salaam.”

“Thank you.”

Ross’s impatience burst its confines and he turned to Myerson: “What’s the flap, then?”

Myerson made a face. “It distresses me, Ross, that you’re the only drone in this department who doesn’t realize that words like ‘flap’ became obsolete sometime before you were born.”

I said, “If you’re through amusing yourself maybe you could answer the young man’s question.”

Myerson squinted at me; after a moment he decided not to be affronted. “As you may know, affairs in Tanzania remain sensitive. Especially since the Uganda affair. The balance is precarious — a sort of three-sided teeter-totter: ourselves, the Soviets and the Chinese. It would require only a slight upheaval to tip the bal—”

“Can’t you spare us the tiresome diplomatic summaries and get down to it?”

Myerson coolly opened the file, selected a photograph and held it up on display. “Recognize the woman?”

To Ross I suppose it was only a badly focused black-and-white of a thin woman with attractive and vaguely Oriental features, age indeterminate. But I knew her well enough. “Marie Lapautre.”

“Indeed.”

Ross leaned forward for a closer look. I imagine it may have been the first time he’d ever seen a likeness of the dragon lady, whose reputation in our world was something like that of John Wesley Hardin in the days of the gunslingers.

“Arbuckle reports she’s been seen in the lobby of the Kilimanjaro in Dar. Buying a picture post card,” Myerson added drily.

I said, “Maybe she’s on vacation. Spending some of the blood money on travel like any well-heeled tourist. She’s never worked that part of the world, you know.”

“Which is precisely why someone might hire her if there were a sensitive job to be done there.”

“That’s all we’ve got? Just the one sighting? No evidence of a caper in progress?”

“If we wait for evidence it could arrive in a pine box. I’d prefer not to have that sort of confirmation.” He scowled toward Ross. “Fidel Castro, of course, has been trying to persuade Tanzania to join him in leading the Third World toward the Moscow sphere of influence, but up to now the Nyerere regime has maintained strict neutrality. We have every reason to wish that it continue to do so. We want the status to remain quo. That’s both the official line and the under-the-counter reality.”

Ross was perfectly aware of all that, I’m sure, but Myerson enjoys exposition. “The Chinese aren’t as charitable as we are toward neutralists,” Myerson went on, “particularly since the Russian meddlings in Angola and Ethiopia. The Chinese want to increase their influence in Africa — that’s confirmed in recent signals from the Far East. Add to this background the presence of Marie Lapautre in Dar-es-Salaam and I believe we must face the likelihood of an explosive event. Possibly you can forecast the nature of it as well as I can?”

The last question was addressed to me, not Ross. I rose to meet it without much effort. “Assuming you’re right, I’d buy a scenario in which Lapautre’s been hired to assassinate one of the top Tanzanian officials. Not Nyerere — that would provoke chaos. But one of the others. Probably one who leans toward the Russian or Chinese line.”

Ross said, “What?”

I told him, “They’d want to make the assassination look like an American plot.”

Myerson said, “It wouldn’t take any more than that to tilt the balance over toward the East.”

“Deal and double deal,” Ross said under his breath in disgust.

“It’s the way the game is played,” Myerson told him. “If you find it repugnant I’d suggest you look for another line of work.” He turned to me: “I’ve booked you two on the afternoon flight by way of Zurich. The assignment is to prevent Lapautre from embarrassing us.”

“All right.” That was the sum of my response; I didn’t ask any questions. I pried myself out of the chair and reached for my coat.

Ross said, “Wait a minute. Why not just warn the Tanzanians? Tell them what we suspect. Wouldn’t that get us off the hook if anything did happen?”

“Hardly,” Myerson said. “It would make things worse. Don’t explain it to him, Charlie — let him reason it out for himself. It should be a useful exercise for him. On your way now — you’ve barely got time to make your plane.”

By the time we were belted into our seats Ross thought he had it worked out. “If we threw them a warning and then somebody got assassinated, it would look like we did it ourselves and tried to alibi it in advance. Is that what Myerson meant?”

“Go to the head of the class.” I gave him the benediction of my saintly smile. Ross is a good kid: not stupid, merely inexperienced. He has sound instincts and good moral fibre, which is more than can be said for most of the Neanderthals in the Company. I explained, “Things are touchy in Tanzania. There’s an excess of suspicion toward auslanders — they’ve been raided and occupied by Portuguese slave traders and German soldiers and British colonialists and you can’t blame them for being xenophobes. You can’t tell them things for their own good. Our only option is to neutralize the dragon lady without anyone’s knowing about it.”

He gave me a sidewise look. “Can we pin down exactly what we mean by that word ‘neutralize’?”

I said, “Have you ever killed a woman?”

“No. Nor a man, for that matter.”

“Neither have I. And I intend to keep it that way.”

“You never even carry a piece, do you, Charlie.”

“No. Any fool can shoot people.”

“Then how can we do anything about it? We can’t just ask her to go away. She’s not the type that scares.”

“Let’s just see how things size up first.” I tipped my head back against the paper antimacassar and closed my eyes and reviewed what I knew about Marie Lapautre — fact, rumor and legend garnered from various briefings and shoptalk along the corridors in Langley.

She had never been known to botch an assignment.

French father, Vietnamese mother. Born 1934 on a plantation west of Saigon. Served as a sniper in the Viet Minh forces at Dienbienphu. Ran with the Cong in the late 1960s with assignments ranging from commando infiltration to assassinations of village leaders and then South Vietnamese officials. Seconded to Peking in 1969 for specialized terrorist instruction. Detached from the Viet Cong, inducted into the Chinese Army and assigned to the Seventh Bureau — a rare honor. Seconded as training cadre to the Japanese Red Army, a terrorist gang. It was rumored Lapautre had planned the tactics for the bombings at Tel Aviv Airport in 1975. During the past seven or eight years Lapautre’s name had cropped up at least a dozen times in reports I’d seen dealing with unsolved assassinations in Laos, Syria, Turkey, Libya, West Germany, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Marie Lapautre’s weapon was the rifle. At least seven of the unsolved assassinations had been effected with long-range fire from Kashkalnikov sniper rifles — the model known to be Lapautre’s choice.

She was forty-five years old, five feet four, one hundred and five pounds, black hair and eyes, mottled burn scar on back of right hand. Spoke five languages, including English. Ate red meat barely cooked when the choice was open. She lived between jobs in a 17th century villa on the Italian Riviera — a home she had bought with funds reportedly acquired from hire-contract jobs as a freelance. Five of the seven suspected assassinations with Kashkalnikovs had been bounty jobs and the other two probably had been unpaid because she still held a commission in Peking’s Seventh Bureau.

We had met, twice and very briefly; both times on neutral ground — once in Singapore, once in Teheran. In Singapore it had been a diplomatic reception; the British attaché had introduced us and stood by watching with amusement while we sized each other up like rival gladiators but it had been nothing more than a few minutes of inconsequential pleasantries and then she had drifted off on the arm of a Malaysian black marketeer.

The files on her were slender and all we really knew was that she was a professional with a preference for the 7.62mm Kashkalnikov and a reputation for never missing a score. By implication I added one other thing: if Lapautre became aware of the fact that two Americans were moving in to prevent her from completing her present assignment she wouldn’t hesitate to kill us — and naturally she would kill us with proficient dispatch.

The flight was interminable. I ate at least five meals. We had to change planes in Zurich and from there it was another nine hours. I noticed that Ross was having trouble keeping his eyes open by the time we checked into the New Africa Hotel.

It had been built by the Germans when Tanganyika had been one of the Kaiser’s colonies and it had been rebuilt by Africans to encourage business travel; it was comfortable enough and I’d picked it mainly for the food, but it happened to be within easy walking distance of the Kilimanjaro where Lapautre had been spotted. Also, unlike the luxurious Kilimanjaro, the New Africa had a middle-class businessman’s matter of factness and one didn’t need to waste time trying to look like a tourist.

The change in time zones seemed to bewilder Ross. He stumbled groggily when we went along to the shabby export office that housed the front organization for Arbuckle’s soporific East Africa station.

A fresh breeze came off the harbor. I’ve always liked Dar; it’s a beautiful port, ringed by palm-shaded beaches and colorful villas on the slopes. Some of the older buildings bespeak a dusty poverty but the city is more modern and energetic than anything you’d expect to find near the equator on the shore of the Indian Ocean. There are jams of hooting traffic on the main boulevards. Businessmen in various shadings: Europeans, turbaned Arabs, madrassed Asians, black Africans in tribal costumes. Now and then a four-by-four lorry growls by carrying a squad of soldiers but the place hasn’t got that air of police-state tension that makes the hairs crawl on the back of my neck in countries like Paraguay and East Germany. It occurred to me as we reached Arbuckle’s office that we hadn’t been accosted by a single beggar.

It was crowded in among cubbyhole curio shops selling African carvings and cloth. Arbuckle was a tall man, thin and bald and nervous; inescapably he was known in the Company as Fatty. He had one item to add to the information we’d arrived with: Lapautre was still in Dar.

“She’s in room four eleven at the Kilimanjaro but she takes most of her dinners in the dining room at the New Africa. They’ve got better beef.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, you would. Watch out you don’t bump into her there. She must have seen your face in dossiers.”

“We’ve met a couple of times. But I doubt she’d know Ross by sight.”

Ross was grinding knuckles into his eye sockets. “Sometimes it pays to be unimportant.”

“Hang onto that thought,” I told him. When we left the office I added, “You’d better go back to the room and take the cure for that jet lag.”

“What about you?”

“Chores and snooping. And dinner, of course. I’ll see you at breakfast. Seven o’clock.”

“You going to tell me what the program is?”

“I see no point discussing anything at all with you until you’ve had a night’s sleep.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“When I’ve got nothing better to do.”

I watched him slouch away under the palms. Then I went about my business.

The breakfast layout was a nice array of fruits, juices, breads, cold cuts. I had heaped a plate full and begun to consume it when Ross came puffy-eyed down to the second-floor dining room and picked his way through the mangoes and sliced ham. He eats like a bird.

The room wasn’t crowded; a sprinkling of businessmen and a few Americans in safari costumes that appeared to have been tailored in Hollywood. I said mildly to Ross when he sat down, “I picked the table at random,” by which I meant that it probably wasn’t bugged. I tasted the coffee and made a face; you’d think they could make it better — after all they grow the stuff there. I put the cup down. “All right. We’ve got to play her cagey and careful. If anything blows loose there won’t be any cavalry to rescue us.”

“Us?”

“Did you think you were here just to feed me straight lines, Ross?”

“Well, I kind of figured I was mainly here to hold your coat. On-the-job training, you know.”

“It’s a two-man job. Actually it’s a six-man job but the two of us have got to carry it.”

“Wonderful. Should I start practicing my quick draw?”

“If you’d stop asking droll questions we’d get along a little faster.”

“All right. Proceed, my general.”

“First the backgrounding. We’re jumping to a number of conclusions based on flimsy evidence but it can’t be helped.” I enumerated them on my fingers. “We assume, one, that she’s here on a job and not just to take pictures of elephants. Two, that it’s a Seventh Bureau assignment. Three, that the job is to assassinate someone — after all, that’s her principal occupation. Four, that the target may be a government leader here, but not Nyerere. We don’t know the timetable so we have to assume, five, that it could happen at any moment. Therefore we must act quickly. Are you with me so far?”

“So far, sure.”

“We assume, six, that the local Chinese station is unaware of her mission.”

“Why should we assume that?”

“Because they’re bugging her room.”

Ross gawked at me.

I am well past normal retirement age and I’m afraid it is not beneath me to gloat at the weaknesses of the younger generations. I said, “I didn’t waste the night sleeping.”

He chewed a mouthful, swallowed, squinted at me. “All right. You went through the dragon lady’s room, you found a bug. But what makes you think it’s a Chinese bug?”

“I found not one bug but three. One was ours — up-to-date equipment and I checked it out with Arbuckle. Had to get him out of bed; he wasn’t happy but he admitted it’s our bug. The second was American-made but obsolescent. Presumably placed in the room by the Tanzanian secret service — we sold a batch of that model to them about ten years ago. The third mike was made in Sinkiang Province, one of those square little numbers they must have shown you in tech briefings. Satisfied?”

“Okay. No Soviet agent worth his vodka would stoop to using a bug of Chinese manufacture, so that leaves the Chinese. So the local Peking station is bugging her room and that means either they don’t know why she’s here or they don’t trust her. Go on.”

“They’re bugging her because she’s been known to freelance. Naturally they’re nervous. But you’re mistaken about one thing. They definitely don’t know why she’s here. The Seventh Bureau never tells anyone anything. So the local station wants to find out who she’s working for and who she’s gunning for. The thing is, Ross, as far as the local Chinese are concerned she could easily be down here on a job for Warsaw or East Berlin or London or Washington or some Arab oil sheikh. They just don’t know, do they?”

“Go on.”

“Now the Tanzanians are bugging her as well and that means they know who she is. She’s under surveillance. That means we have to act circumspectly. We can’t make waves that might splash up against the presidential palace. When we leave here we leave everything exactly as we found it, all right? Now then. More assumptions. We assume, seven, that Lapautre isn’t a hipshooter. If she were she wouldn’t have lasted this long. She’s careful, she cases the situation before she steps into it. We can use that caution of hers. And finally, we assume, eight, that she’s not very well versed in surveillance technology.” Then I added, “That’s a crucial assumption, by the way.”

“Why? How can we assume that?”

“She’s never been an intelligence gatherer. Her experience is in violence. She’s a basic sort of creature — a carnivore. I don’t see her as a scientific whiz. She uses an old-fashioned sniper’s rifle because she’s comfortable with it — she’s not an experimenter. She’d know the rudiments of electronic eavesdropping but when it comes to sophisticated devices I doubt she’s got much interest. Apparently she either doesn’t know her room is bugged or knows it but doesn’t care. Either way it indicates the whole area is outside her field of interest. Likely there are types of equipment she doesn’t even know about.”

“Like for instance?”

“Parabolic reflectors. Long-range directionals.”

“Those are hardly ultrasophisticated. They date back to World War II.”

“But not in the Indochinese jungles. They wouldn’t be a part of her experience.”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m not briefing you just to listen to the sound of my dulcet baritone voice, Ross. The local Chinese station is equipped with parabolics and directionals.”

“I see.” He said it but he obviously didn’t see. Not yet. It was getting a bit tedious leading him along by the nose but I liked him and it might have been worse: Myerson might have sent along one of the idiot computer whiz-kids who are perfectly willing to believe the earth is flat if an IBM machine says it is.

I said, “You’re feeding your face and you look spry enough but are you awake? You’ve got to memorize your lines fast and play your part perfectly the first time out.”

“What are you talking about?”

According to plan Ross made the phone call at nine in the morning from a coin box in the cable office. He held the receiver out from his ear so I could eavesdrop. A clerk answered and Ross asked to be connected to extension four eleven; it rang three times and was picked up. I remembered her voice right away: low and smoky. “Oui?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars, in gold, deposited to a Swiss account.” That was the opening line because it was unlikely she’d hang up on us right away after that teaser. “Are you interested?”

“Who is this?”

“Clearly, Mademoiselle, one does not mention names on an open telephone line. I think we might arrange a meeting, however. It’s an urgent matter.”

Ross’s palm was visibly damp against the receiver. I heard the woman’s voice: “For whom are you speaking, M’sieur?”

“I represent certain principals.” Because she wouldn’t deal directly with anyone fool enough to act as his own front man. Ross said, “You’ve been waiting to hear from me, n’est-ce-pas?” That was for the benefit of those who were bugging her phone; he went on quickly before she could deny it: “At noon today I’ll be on the beach just north of the fishing village at the head of the bay. I’ll be wearing a white shirt, short sleeves; khaki trousers and white plimsolls. I’ll be alone and of course without weapons.” I saw him swallow quickly.

The line seemed dead for a while but finally the woman spoke. “Perhaps.”

Click.

“Perhaps,” Ross repeated dismally, and cradled it.

Driving us north in the rent-a-car he said to me, “She didn’t sound enthusiastic, did she. You think she’ll come?”

“She’ll come.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Without phone calls like that she wouldn’t be able to maintain her standard of living.”

“But if she’s in the middle of setting up a caper here—”

“It doesn’t preclude her from discussing the next job. She’ll come.”

“Armed to the teeth, no doubt,” Ross muttered.

“No. She’s a pro. A pro never carries a gun when he’s not on a job — a gun can get you into too much trouble if it’s discovered. But she’s probably capable of dismantling you by hand in a hundred different ways so try not to provoke her until we’ve sprung the trap.”

“You can be incredibly comforting sometimes, you know that?”

“You’re green, Ross, and you have a tendency to be flip and you’d better realize this isn’t a matter for frivolous heroics. You’re not without courage and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. But don’t treat this thing with childish bravado. There’s a serious risk you may end up facedown in the surf if you don’t treat the woman with all the caution in the world. Your job’s simple and straightforward and there’s nothing funny about it — just keep her interested and steer her to the right place. And for God’s sake, remember your lines.”

We parked off the road and walked through the palms toward the edge of the water. The beach was a narrow white strip of perfect sand curving away in a crescent. There was hardly any surf. At the far end of the curve I saw a scatter of thatched huts and a few dilapidated old piers to which were tethered a half dozen primitive outrigger fishing boats. It was pleasantly warm and the air was clear arid dry: the East African coast has none of the muggy tropicality of the West one. Two small black children ran up and down the distant sand and their strident voices carried weakly to my ears. The half mile of beach between was empty of visible life. A tourist-poster scene, I thought, but clearly a feeling of menace was preoccupying Ross; I had to steady him with a hand on his shoulder.

Out on the open water, beyond a few small boats floating at anchor, a pair of junks drifted south with the mild wind in their square sails. A dazzling white sport-fisherman with a flying bridge rode the swells in a lazy figure-eight pattern about four hundred yards offshore; two men in floppy white hats sat in the stern chairs trolling lines. Beyond, on the horizon, a tramp prowled northward — a coaster: Tanga next, then Mombasa, so forth. And there was a faint spiral of smoke even farther out — probably the Zanzibar ferry.

I put my back to the view and spoke in a voice calculated to reach no farther than Ross’s ears: “Spot them?”

Ross was searching the beach. “Not a soul. Maybe they didn’t get the hint.”

“The sport fisherman, Ross. They’ve got telescopes and long-range microphones focused on this beach right now and if I were facing them they’d hear every word I’m saying.”

That was why we’d given it several hours’ lead time after making the phone call. To give the Chinese time to get in position to monitor the meeting.

“They’ve taken the bait,” I said. “It remains to be seen whether the dragon lady will prove equally gullible.”

Ross was carrying the rifle and I crooked a finger and he gave it to me. We were still in the palms, too shadowed for the watchers on the fishing boat to get much of a look at us. I slid back into the deeper shadows and watched Ross begin to walk out along the beach, kicking sand with his toes. He had his hands in his pockets but then thought better of that and took them out again and I applauded him for that — he was making it obvious his hands were empty.

I saw him look at his watch. It was eleven fifty-five. Don’t get too nervous, Ross. He walked out to the middle of the crescent of sand and stood there looking back inland and I had some idea what he was going through: trying to ignore the fishing boat a quarter of a mile behind him, trying to talk himself out of the acute feeling that someone’s telescopic crosshairs were centered between his shoulder blades.

I watched him begin to walk around in an aimless little circle — perhaps he felt they’d have a harder time hitting a moving target. He hadn’t much to worry about, actually; they had no reason to take potshots at him — they’d be curious, not murderous — but perhaps Ross was no longer in a state of mind where logic was the ruling factor. I trusted him to do his part, though. I knew a little about him. He’d come right into the Company after college, seeking adventure and challenge, and if he’d been worried by the stink of the Company’s growing notoriety he’d balanced it with a naïve notion that the Company needed people like him to keep it clean. Mainly what I knew about him was that Joe Cutter gave him very high marks and there’s nobody in Langley whose judgment I’d sooner trust than Joe’s. This caper should have been Joe’s by rights — it was more in his line than mine, I’m more of a trouble-shooter and rarely get picked for front-line counter-espionage capers because I’m too visible — but Joe hates Myerson even more than I do and he’d managed to get himself posted out to the Near East away from Myerson’s influence.

I heard the putt-putt of an engine and watched a little outboard come in sight around the headland and beat its way forward, its bow gently slapping the water, coming at a good clip. Ross saw it too — looked at it, then looked away, back into the palm trees — probably wondering when the woman would show up. He hadn’t yet realized she was already here. I saw him do a slow take and turn on his heel again. Then we both watched the outboard come straight in onto the beach.

It was the dragon lady and she was alone at the tiller. She tipped the engine up across the transom, jumped overside and came nimbly ashore, dragging the boat up onto the sand a bit. Then she turned to look at Ross across the intervening forty yards of sand. I had a good view of her in profile. Ross was trying to meet her stare without guile. Her eyes left him after a bit and began to explore the trees. I didn’t stir; I was in among a cluster of palm boles and the thing she’d spot first would be movement.

She made a thorough job of it before she turned toward Ross. She walked with lithe graceful strides: petite but there was nothing fragile about her. She wore an ao dai, the simple formfitting dress of Indochina; it was painted to her skin and there was no possibility she could have concealed a weapon under it. Perhaps she wore it for that reason.

Ross didn’t move. He let her come to him. It was in his instructions.

I was near enough to hear them because the offshore breeze carried their voices to me.

“Well then, M’sieur.”

“The money,” Ross began, and then he stopped, tongue-tied.

Christ. He’d forgotten his lines.

“Oui?”

He looked away from her. Perhaps it was the glimpse of the white sport boat out there that galvanized him. I heard him speak clearly and calmly: “The money’s on deposit and we have the receipt and the numbered account book. If you do the job you’ll be given both of them. Two hundred thousand American dollars in gold. That works out to something over half a million Swiss francs at the current rate.”

She said, “I would need a bit more information than that.”

“The name of the target, of course. The deadline date by which the assignment must be completed. More than that you don’t need.” Ross kept his face straight. I had a feeling he was feverishly rehearsing the rest of his lines.

She said, “You’ve left out one thing.”

“I don’t think so, Mlle. Lapautre.”

“I must know who employs me.”

“Not included in the price of your ticket, I’m afraid.”

“Then we’ve wasted our morning, both of us.”

“For two hundred thousand dollars we expected a higher class of discretion than you seem inclined to exercise.” It was a line I had drilled into him and apparently he hadn’t liked it — it went against his usual mode of expression — but I had insisted on the precise wording, and now she responded as I’d said she would: it was as if I’d written her dialogue as well as Ross’s.

She said, “Discretion costs a little more, M’sieur, especially if it concerns those whom I might regard as my natural enemies. You are American.”

“I am. That’s not to say my principals are.”

The thing is, Ross, you don’t want to close the door, you want to keep her talking. String her along, whet her curiosity. She’s going to insist on more information. Stall. Stretch it out. Don’t give her the name of the target until she’s in position.

Casually Ross put his hands in his pockets and turned away from her. I watched him stroll very slowly toward me. He didn’t look back to see if she was following him. He spoke in a normal tone so that she’d have trouble hearing him against the wind if she let him get too far ahead of her. “My principals are willing to discuss the matter more directly with you if you agree to take the job on. Not a face-to-face meeting, of course, but one of them may be willing to speak to you on a safe line. Coin telephones at both ends — you know the drill.”

It was working. She was trailing along, moving as casually as he was. Ross threw his head back and stared at the sky. I saw what she couldn’t see — Ross wetting his lips nervously. “The target isn’t a difficult one. The security measures aren’t too tough.”

“But he’s important, isn’t he. Visible. Otherwise the price would not be so high.”

It was something I hadn’t forecast for him and I wasn’t sure Ross would know how to handle it but he did the right thing: he made no reply at all. He just kept drifting toward the palms, off on a tangent from me now, moving in seemingly aimless half circles. After a moment he said, “Of course you weren’t followed here.” It was in the script.

“Why do you think I chose to come by open boat? No one followed me. Can you say the same?”

Position.

Ross turned and she moved alongside. She had, as I had predicted, followed his lead: it was Indochinese courtesy, inbred and unconscious — the residue of a servile upbringing.

She stood beside him now a few feet to his right; like Ross she was facing the palm trees.

Ross dropped his voice and spoke without turning his head; there was no possibility the microphones on the boat would hear him. I barely caught his words myself, and I was only about thirty feet downwind of him. “Don’t speak for a moment now, Mademoiselle. Look slightly to your right — the little cluster of palm trees.”

She was instantly alert and suspicious; I saw her face come around and I stirred a bit and it was enough to make her spot me. Then I leveled the rifle, aiming down the sights.

In the same guarded low voice Ross said, “It’s a Mannlicher bolt action with high-speed ammunition. Hollowpoint bullets and he’s an expert marksman. You’d stand no chance at all if you tried to run for it.” Ross kept stepping back because I’d told him not to let her get close enough to jump him and use him for a shield. Yet he had to stay within voice range because if he lifted his tone or turned his head the fine-focus directional mike on the sport fishing boat would pick up his words immediately.

I saw her shoulders drop half an inch and felt relief. If she doesn’t break for it in the first few seconds she won’t break at all. She’s a pro and a pro doesn’t fight the drop.

“You’re in a box, Mlle. Lapautre. You’ve got one way to get out of it alive. Are you listening to me?”

“Certainly.”

“Don’t try to figure it out because there are parts of it you’ll never know. We’re playing out a charade, that’s all you need to keep in mind. Play your part as required and you’ll walk away alive.”

“What do you want, then?”

It was evident that her cool aplomb amazed Ross, even though I’d told him to expect it.

I knew she couldn’t have recognized me; most of me was behind one of the palms and all she really could see was a heavyset fellow with a rifle. Because of the angle I was hidden completely from the view of those on board the sport fishing boat. All they’d be able to tell was that Ross and Lapautre were having a conversation in tones too low for their equipment to record. They’d be frustrated and angry but they’d hang on hoping to pick up scraps of words that they could later edit together and make some sense out of.

Ross answered her, sotto voce: “I want you to obey my instructions now. In a moment I’m going to step around and face you. The man in the trees will kill you if you make any sudden move, so pay attention.... Now I’m going to start talking to you in a loud voice. The things I say may not make much sense to you. I don’t care what you say by way of response — but say it quietly so that nobody hears your answers. And I want you to nod your head ‘yes’ now and then to make it look as if you’re agreeing with whatever proposition I make to you. Understand?”

“No,” she said, “I do not understand.”

“But you’ll do as I say, won’t you.”

“I seem to have little choice.” She was looking right at me when she said that.

“That’s good enough. Here we go.”

Then Ross stepped off to the side and made a careful circle around her, keeping his distance, looking commend-ably casual. He started talking midway around: “Then we’ve got a deal. I’m glad you agreed to take it on.”

He stopped when he was facing her from her port bow. The woman didn’t speak; she only watched him. Ross enunciated clearly and I appreciated that; we both were mindful of the shotgun microphone focused on his lips from four hundred yards offshore.

“I’m glad,” he said again. “You’re the best in the business, I think everybody knows that.”

Her lip curled ever so slightly: an expression exquisite in its subtle contempt. “And just what is it I’m supposed to have agreed to?”

Ross nodded vigorously. “Exactly. When you talk to my principals you’ll recognize the Ukrainian accents immediately but I hope that won’t deter you from putting your best effort into it.”

“This is absurd.” But she kept her voice right down. I was aiming the thing straight at her heart.

“That’s right,” Ross said cheerfully. “There will be no official Soviet record of the transaction. If they’re accused of anything naturally they’ll deny it so you can see that it’s in your own best interests to keep absolutely silent.”

“This is pointless. Who can possibly benefit from this ridiculous performance?”

“I think they’ll find that acceptable,” Ross said. “Now then, about the target. He must be taken out within the next twelve days because that’s the deadline for a particular international maneuver the details of which needn’t concern you. The target is here in Dar-es-Salaam, so you’ll have plenty of time to set up the assassination. Do you recognize the name Chiang Hsien?”

She laughed then. She actually laughed. “Incredible.”

Ross managed to smile. “Yes. The chief of the Chinese station in Dar. Now there’s just one more detail.”

“Is that all? Thank goodness for that.”

Ross nodded pleasantly. “Yes, that’s right. You’ve got to make it look as if it’s the work of Americans. I’d suggest you use an American rifle. I leave the other details in your hands, but the circumstantial evidence must point to an American plot against the Chinese people’s representative. You understand?”

“Is that all, then?”

“If you still want confirmation I’ll arrange for a telephone contact between you and my principals. I think that covers everything, then. It’s always pleasant doing business with a professional.” With a courtly bow — he might have been Doug Fairbanks himself — Ross turned briskly on his heel and marched away toward the trees without looking back.

I watched the woman walk back to her open boat. The junks had disappeared past the point of land to the south; the outriggers were still tethered in the water by the village; the coastal steamer was plowing north, the Zanzibar ferry’s smoke had disappeared — and the two white-hatted men in the stern of the sport fishing boat were packing up their rods and getting out of their swivel chairs. The dragon lady pushed her boat into the surf, climbed over the gunwale, made her way aft and hooked the outboard engine over the transom. She yanked the cord a few times. It sputtered and roared; and she went chugging out in a wide circle toward the open water, angling to starboard to clear the headland.

When she’d gone a couple of hundred yards Ross came through the trees beside me and said, “What happens now?”

“Watch.” I smiled at him. “You did a beautiful job, you know.”

“Yeah, I know I did.”

I liked him for that. I hate false modesty.

The sport fisherman was moving, its engines whining, planing the water: collision course. Near the headland it intercepted the little open outboard boat. The woman tried to turn away but the big white boat leaped ahead of her and skidded athwart her course.

“That skipper knows how to handle her,” Ross commented without pleasure.

With no choice left, the woman allowed her boat to be drawn alongside by a long-armed man with a boathook. One of the men in the stern — one of the two with white hats — gave her a hand aboard. She didn’t put up a struggle; she was a pro. I saw them push her toward the cabin — they went below, out of sight, and then the two boats disappeared around the headland, one towing the other.

Ross and I walked back to the car; I tossed the rifle into the back seat — we’d drop it off at Arbuckle’s. It wasn’t loaded. If she’d called our bluff I’d have let her run for it. (There’s always another day.)

I said, “They’ll milk her of course, but they won’t believe a word of it. They’ve got the evidence on tape and they won’t buy her denials. They wouldn’t believe the truth in a thousand years and it’s all she’s got to offer.”

Ross leaned against the car, both arms against the roof, head down between his arms. “You know what they’ll do to her, don’t you. After they squeeze her dry.”

I said, “It’ll happen a long way from here and nobody will ever know about it.”

“And that makes it right?”

“No. It adds another load to whatever we’ve already got on our consciences. If it makes you feel a little better it’s a form of justice — think of the people she’s murdered. She may survive this, you know. She may come out of it alive. But if she does she’ll never get another job in that line of work. Nobody’ll trust her again.”

“It hasn’t solved a thing,” he complained. He gave me a petulant little boy look. “They’ll just send somebody to take her place, won’t they? Next week or next month.”

“Maybe they will. If they do we’ll have to deal with it when it happens. You may as well get used to it, Ross — you play one game, you finish it, you add up the score and then you put the pieces back onto the board and start the next game. That’s all there is to it — and that’s the fun of it. As long as you stay lucky there’s always another game.”

Ross stared at me. “I guess there is,” he said reluctantly.

We got in the car and Ross turned the key. I smiled briefly, trying to reassure him. The starter meshed and he put it in gear. He said with sudden savagery, “But it’s not all that much fun for the losers, is it.”

“That’s why you should always play to win,” I replied.

Ross fishtailed the car angrily out into the road.