Dr. Death

Two

I stared at her, still holding her shoulder. She was watching me intently.

"St. Pierre did not tell you, then?"

"St. Pierre didn't have time to tell me," I said. "His head was blown off just when the story was getting interesting."

She shuddered and turned away.

"I saw," she whispered. "It happened inches from my face. It was horrible. I will have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. And he had been so kind, so comforting. After my father disappeared…"

"If it was your father," I said. "If you are Michelle Duroche."

"Oh, I understand," she said quickly. "It is difficult for you to conceive of the daughter of Fernand Duroche, the eminent scientist, performing the dance-du-ventre in a Moroccan hashish club. But…"

"No. Not at all," I said. "In fact, it's just the kind of thing Remy St. Pierre would have arranged. What better place to hide you? But that still doesn't prove to me that you're Michelle Duroche."

"And what proves to me that you are Nick Carter, the man St. Pierre described to me as the most brilliant and deadly spy on four continents?" she asked, her voice growing sharper.

I eyed her speculatively.

"I might be able to prove it," I said. "What kind of proof do you want?"

"Très bien," she said. "You wish to learn if I know of your means of identification. Very well. Show me the inner side of your right elbow."

I pushed back the sleeves of my jacket and shirt. She leaned forward to read the AXE identification tattooed on my inner elbow, then lifted her head and nodded.

"I also know your code name: N3; and your title: Killmaster," she said. "St. Pierre also explained to me, Mr. Carter, that this AXE which you work for is the most highly secret agency in the United States government intelligence system, and that the jobs it takes on are too tough and too dirty for even the CIA."

"Beautiful," I said, rolling down my sleeves. "You know all about me. And what I know about you…"

"I am not only the daughter of Fernand Duroche," she said quickly, "but also librarian for project RENARD. I have the Class 2 security clearance which such a job demands. If you place a call to the RENARD headquarters they will give you a means of firmly identifying me: Three personal questions to which only I, and RENARD, know the answers."

"What about your mother?" T asked. "Wouldn't she know the answers to some of those questions too?"

"No doubt," said the girl coolly. "If, as you undoubtedly know, she had not been dead for the last sixteen years."

I grinned slightly.

"You are a very suspicious man, Mr. Carter," she said. "But even you must realize that, short of decorating myself with tattoos, which doesn't appeal to me at all, I had few places to conceal identity cards in the costume which I…"

She gasped suddenly and flung both arms over her naked breasts.

"Mon Dieu! I had completely forgotten…"

I grinned again.

"I hadn't," I said. I pulled off my jacket and handed it to her. "We have to get out of here, and you're going to attract enough attention in the street as it is. I wouldn't want to start a riot."

Even in the dim moonlight that filtered through the dirty windows, I could see her blush as she twisted into the jacket.

"But where can we go?" she asked. "I was sleeping in a small room on the floor above the club, which Remy had arranged for me with his friends, the owners. He was afraid…"

"…that if your father was kidnapped, and he didn't cooperate with his kidnappers, you might be next on the list. A hostage for your father's cooperation." I finished for her.

She nodded. "Exactly. But we cannot return to the club now. There will be police, and the gunman who escaped might come again."

I put my hand on her shoulder and guided her toward the door.

"We aren't going anywhere near the club," I assured her. "I have a friend. His name is Akhmed and he owns a bar. I've done him a few favors." Like saving him from a life-term in a French jail, I could have added, but didn't. "Now he's going to do me a few."

"Then you do believe that I am Michelle Duroche?" she asked. Her voice was pleading.

"If you're not," I said, looking down at the view between the lapels of my jacket, which was highly improved on its present wearer, "you're an interesting substitute."

She smiled, looking up at me as I opened the door and we went through.

"I feel better," she said. "I was afraid…"

She gasped again. It was more of a muffled shriek.

"Your face… your face…"

My mouth tightened. In the full glare of moonlight, I could imagine what my face, hands, and shirt must look like, splattered and smeared with Remy St. Pierre's blood. I pulled a clean handkerchief from a pants pocket, dampened it with rum from my flask, and did the best I could to clean up. When I'd finished I could tell from the look of controlled horror on her face that I still resembled something out of a nightmare.

"Come on," I said, taking her arm. "We both need a hot shower, but that'll have to wait. In a few hours there'll be an army of cops around here."

I guided her away from the port area, away from the vicinity of the club. It took me a few blocks before I knew exactly where I was. Then I found the Rue Zhirana, and turned right, into a long, twisting alley which led toward Akhmed's bar. It smelled like any other Tangier alley, of urine, damp clay, and half-rotten vegetables. The decaying clay houses pressing in on either side of us were dark and silent. It was late. Only a few people passed us, but those who did took one quick look and averted their heads, scurrying away quietly. We must have made a disturbing picture: A beautiful and voluptuous long-haired girl dressed only in translucent harem pants and a man's jacket, accompanied by a grim-faced man whose skin was streaked by human blood. Passersby avoided us instinctively: We had the smell of bad trouble on us.

So did Akhmed's bar.

The Marrakesh Lounge was the most posh, expensive, glamorous bar in the medina. It catered to the rich, sophisticated Moroccan businessman, and to the knowledgeable tourist who wanted neither a hashish dive nor a phonied-up tourist trap. Akhmed had saved his money for a long time to buy it, and now he ran it very carefully. He paid his protection money to the police, of course, just as he paid it to certain other powerful elements on the other side of the law. But he also kept out of trouble with the law by making sure that the bar didn't become a hangout for dope dealers, junkies, smugglers, and criminals. Part of ensuring his position consisted of his set-up: The bar was on the far side of a courtyard. The courtyard had a high wall topped with broken glass set into the concrete and a heavy wooden door. Beside the door was a buzzer and an intercom. Customers buzzed, gave their names, and were admitted only if Akhmed knew them, or the person who had referred them. Once in the courtyard, they were subjected to a further perusal by Akhmed's keen eyes. If unwelcome, they found themselves on the street in record time. When the bar closed, toward morning, both the courtyard door and the bar door itself were double-locked.

The bar was closed now. But the courtyard door was open, standing a few inches ajar.

I hadn't seen it like that in the six years that Akhmed had owned the place.

"What's wrong?" the girl whispered, when she saw me hesitate before the door.

"I don't know," I replied. "Maybe nothing. Maybe Akhmed's just getting sloppy and careless with success. But this door shouldn't be open."

I peered cautiously through the crack in the door into the courtyard. The bar itself was dark. There was no sign of movement.

"Should we go in?" the girl asked uncertainly.

"We'll go in," I said. "But not through the courtyard. Not where we make perfect targets for anybody who might be in the bar, hidden in the dark, while we're in bright moonlight."

"Then how?"

Without speaking, I guided her by the shoulder, down the street. Akhmed had an emergency exit too, even if I didn't intend to use it as an exit. At least it didn't involve squirming through an unused sewer. We went to the corner, I held the girl back for a moment while I made sure the street was empty, then we turned right and walked silently to the third building on the street. The words Mohammed Franzi, Spices and Incense were written in Arabic script on a faded, peeling sign over the door. The door itself, of heavy, rusting metal, was locked. But I had the key. I'd had it for the past six years. It was Akhmed's opening-night gift to me: The guarantee I'd always have a safe house when I was in Tangier. I used the key, pushed open the door on it's well-oiled, silent hinges, and closed it behind us. Beside me, the girl paused, and sniffed.

"That smell," she said. "What is that strange smell?"

"Spices," I said. "Arabic spices. Myrrh, frankincense, alloes, all the ones you read about in the Bible. And speaking of bibles…"

I groped my way past barrels of finely powdered spices and burlap sacks full of incense, to a niche in the wall. There, on an elaborately decorated cloth, lay a copy of the Koran, the sacred book of Islam. A Moslem intruder might rob everything in the place, but he wouldn't touch that I touched it. I opened it to a certain page, changing the balance of weight on the niche. Below and in front of it, a section of the floor slid back.

"As secret passages go," I said to the girl, taking her by her hand, "this is a lot more first-class than the one we just left."

"I apologize," said the girl. "God forbid Nick Carter should encounter a tourist-class secret passage."

I smiled inwardly. Whether she was Fernand Duroche's daughter or not, this girl had guts. She was already half-recovered from an experience that would have sent a lot of people into a state of shock for months.

"Where are we going?" she whispered behind me.

"The passageway leads under two houses and an alley," I said, lighting our way along the narrow stone shaft with a pencil flashlight. "It comes up…"

We both halted abruptly. There was a scurrying sound ahead, then a confusion of squealing noises.

"What is it?" the girl whispered urgently, again pressing her warm body against me.

I listened another moment, then urged her on.

"Nothing to worry about," I said. "Just rats."

"Rats!" She pulled me to a halt. "I can't…"

I pulled her forward.

"We don't have time for delicacy now," I said. "Anyway, they're more afraid of us than we are of them."

"That I doubt."

I didn't answer. The passage had ended. We climbed a short, steep flight of stone steps. Ahead, in the wall, was one end of a wine barrel, five feet in diameter. I aimed the beam of the pencil light at it, moved the slender beam in a counter-clockwise direction around the barrel, and found the fourth stave from the top. I pushed it in. The exposed end swung open. The barrel was empty except for a small compartment at the top far end, which contained a few gallons of wine which could be drawn to deceive anyone who suspected the barrel was a dummy.

I turned to the girl. She was pressed against the damp wall, shivering now in her flimsy costume.

"You stay here," I said. "I'll be back for you. If I'm not back, go to the American Embassy. Tell them you must contact David Hawk at AXE. Tell them that, but no more. Talk to no one but Hawk. Do you understand?"

"No," she said quickly. "I'm going with you. I don't want to stay here alone."

"Forget it," I said tersely. "It's only in the movies that you can get away with that I'm going with you' line. If there's any trouble in there, you'd just be in the way. Anyway," I ran one finger down her chin and neck, "you're far too beautiful to be walking around with your head blown off."

Before she could protest again I had climbed into the end of the barrel and swung the lid shut after me. Instantly, it became obvious that the barrel had actually been used for storing wine a long time before it had been made into a dummy. The residual fumes gagged me and made my head reel. I waited a moment, steadied myself, then crawled to the far end and listened.

At first I heard nothing. Silence. Then, some distance away, voices. Or at least, sounds that might have been voices. Except that they were distorted, and the almost inhuman quality told me that the distortion wasn't caused merely by distance.

I hesitated for another moment, then decided to take a chance. Slowly, gently, I pushed against the butt end of the barrel. Silently, it swung open. I crouched with Wilhelmina in my hand at the ready.

Nothing. Darkness. Silence. But by the dim shaft of moonlight that came in through a tiny square window set high in the wall, I could make out the bulky shapes of wine barrels and the wooden tiers of the wine-bottle racks. Akhmed's wine cellar, housing the best collection of vintage wines in North Africa, seemed in perfectly normal condition for this hour of night.

Then I heard the sounds again.

They weren't pretty.

I crept out of the barrel, shutting it carefully behind me, and padded across the stone floor to the metal bars that lined the entrance to the wine cellar. I had a key for those, too, and I used it in silence. The hallway beyond, leading to the stairs to the bar, was dark. But from a room off that hall came a dim, yellow rectangle of light.

And the voices.

There were three. Two, I could recognize now as human. I could even recognize the language they were speaking — French. The third — well, its sounds were animal. The sounds of an animal in agony.

Pressing my body against the wall, I moved toward the rectangle of light. The voices grew louder, the animal sounds more tormented. When I was a few inches from the door I leaned my head forward and peered through the opening between door and doorjamb.

What I saw wrenched my stomach. And then made me clench my teeth with anger.

Akhmed was naked, his wrists were bound together around a meat hook from which he was suspended. His torso was a blackened ruin of scorched skin, muscles, and nerves. Blood ran from his mouth and from the gouged-out craters of his eye sockets. As I watched, one of the two men puffed at a cigar until its tip was glowing red, then brutally pressed it to Akhmed's side, to the tender flesh under the armpit.

Akhmed screamed. Only he couldn't manage a real scream anymore. Only those gurgling, inhuman sounds of pain beyond pain.

His wife had been luckier. She lay a few feet away. Her throat had been slit so deeply and widely that her head was nearly severed from her neck.

The cigar-tip was applied to Akhmed's flesh again. His body twitched convulsively. I tried not to hear the sounds that came from his mouth, or see the bubbling blood that came out at the same time.

"You are still being foolish, Akhmed," the man with the cigar said. "You think that if you still refuse to speak, we will let you die. But I assure you, you will remain alive — and be sorry that you are alive — for as long as we wish you to — until you tell us what we wish to know."

Akhmed said nothing. I doubt if he even heard the man's words. He was a lot closer to death than these men realized.

"Alors, Henri," said the other, in the drawling French of one born in Marseilles, "shall we castrate this filth?"

I'd seen enough. I took one step backward, concentrated all my energies, and kicked. The door exploded from its hinges and hurtled forward into the room. I was right behind it. Even as the two men turned, my finger was gently squeezing Wilhelmina's trigger. A bright circle of red appeared in the forehead of the man with the cigar. He spun around, then plummeted forward. He was a corpse before he hit the floor. I could have disposed of the other man a split second later with another bullet, but I had other plans for him. Before his hand could reach the.38 revolver holstered under his left arm, Wilhelmina had disappeared, and Hugo was sliding into my hand. There was a bright flash of steel blade flickering through the air, and Hugo's point sliced neatly through the tendons of the second man's gun arm. He screamed, clawing at his arm. But he was no coward. Even with his right arm hanging bloodied and useless, he hurled himself at me. I deliberately waited until he was only inches away before I stepped aside. My elbow tapped his skull as his body, now totally out of control, hurtled past me. His head snapped up as the rest of his body slammed point blank to the floor. He was hardly down before I had rolled him over, face up, and pressed two fingers on the exposed sciatic nerve of his bloodied arm. The scream that came from his throat almost deafened me.

"Who do you work for?" I gritted. "Who sent you?"

He stared up at me, his eyes wide with pain.

"Who sent you?" I demanded again.

The terror in his eyes was overwhelming, but he said nothing. I pressed the sciatic nerve again. He shrieked, and his eyes rolled upward.

"Talk, damn you," I gritted. "What Akhmed felt was pleasure compared to what's going to happen to you if you don't talk. And just remember, Akhmed was my friend."

For an instant he simply stared up at me. Then, before I realized what he was doing, his jaws moved swiftly and violently. I heard a faint splintering sound. The man's body stiffened, and his mouth stretched into a rictus of a smile. Then the body slumped, inert. A faint smell of bitter almonds came to my nostrils.

A suicide capsule, hidden in his teeth. Die before you talk, they had told him — whoever they were — and he had done just that.

I pushed his body aside. The faint moans I could still hear coming from Akhmed were tearing at my guts. I retrieved Hugo from the floor, and, cradling his body in my left arm, cut my friend's bonds. I laid him on the floor as gently as possible. His breathing was shallow, weak.

"Akhmed," I said softly. "Akhmed, my friend."

He stirred. One hand fumbled for and found my arm. Incredibly, something like a smile appeared on the tortured, bloodied mouth.

"Carter," he said. "My… friend."

"Akhmed, who were they?"

"Thought… sent by St. Pierre… opened gate for them after bar closed. Carter… listen…"

His voice was getting weaker. I bent my head to his mouth.

"Trying to reach you for two weeks… something going on here… our old friends…"

He coughed. A trickle of blood slid from his lips.

"Akhmed," I said. "Tell me."

"My wife," he whispered. "Is she all right?"

There was no point in telling him.

"She's okay," I said. "Just knocked unconscious."

"Good… woman," he whispered. "Fought like hell. Carter… listen…"

I bent closer.

"…tried… contact you, then St. Pierre. Our old friends… the bastards… heard they'd kidnapped somebody…"

"Kidnapped who?"

"Don't know… but… brought him first here, Tangier, then…"

I could hardly distinguish the words.

"Then where, Akhmed?" I asked urgently. "Where did they take him after Tangier?"

A spasm seized his body. His hand scrabbled along my arm. The mutilated mouth made a last desperate effort to speak.

"…leopards…" he seemed to say."…leopards… pearl…"

Then: "The volcano, Carter… volcano…"

His head fell to one side, and his body relaxed.

Akhmed Djoulibi, my friend, was dead.

He had repaid my favors. And then some.

And he'd left me with a legacy. An enigmatic set of words.

Leopards.

Pearl.

And, the same word that Remy St. Pierre had last spoken on this earth:

Volcano.