Nick Carter

The Arab Plague

Dedicated to

The Men of the Secret Services of the

United States of America

Chapter 1

A creeping, crawling blanket of uneasy tension lay over me, and I wondered why. It was usually a signal of danger, a kind of private early warning system of my own. I knew better than to disregard it, but I wondered if this time not wanting the damned job in the first place hadn’t brought it on. I’d never been on an assignment that wasn’t rough and dirty, but this one had its own special brand of nastiness that got to you inside.

Well, I was here, like it or not, in Jidda, main port of entry of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was a place to be uneasy in and unsure of, if ever there was one, a land where yesterday had never moved over to make room for today. The heat, 115 degrees of hot, dry, blast-furnace air, didn’t help matters any either. I no sooner wiped the back of my neck with a soggy handkerchief than I could start all over again.

Then I wondered if maybe it was the girl who’d set me on edge. The first time I saw her was just outside the airport, as I was heading for a cab to take me into the city. Tall, long-legged, very blond hair swept up into a pyramid atop her head, wearing a tight blue skirt and a clinging white blouse that outlined the deep fullness of her breasts, she wasn’t the kind to go unnoticed anywhere. Here, amid the turbanned, veiled and robed figures, she was a brilliant splash in a monochromatic canvas.

As she cut in front of me, her eyes met mine for a brief instant, and I saw a flicker of recognition in them, though I’d never seen her before. It was there, for just a brief second, in the cool blue eyes and then it vanished, just as she vanished into the crowd.

I even wondered if the season hadn’t got to me, subconsciously. It was the time when the pilgrims gathered on their way to the holy city of Mecca. I had come a day early, checking in at the Hotel Nomad, one of Ibn Hassouk’s enterprises. Hassouk owned half of Arabia, or so it seemed. The fabulously wealthy son of a desert king, playboy, libertine, he was something of a man of mystery for all his well-publicized jet-set travels and his legendary pursuit of women — a kind of Arabian Don Juan.

Walking through the teeming streets of Jidda, I observed the throngs of faithful arriving by every means of transportation, by donkey, horse, camel, car, wagon and on foot, all thirsting to become a hadji, one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and stood before the Ka’ba, Islam’s most sacred shrine.

During this time, the time of Dhu l-Hijja, the month of the pilgrimage, they came from all over the world. I saw green turbans from Iran, striped Indonesian sarongs, patterned Egyptian galabias, blue Yemeni caftans and the traditional haiks of the Arab women, some veiled and some not. Before starting on the last leg of the pilgrimage to Mecca, they would all change to the simple ihraam, the pilgrim’s garb of two pieces of seamless white cloth, one worn around the waist, the other draped over the left shoulder. The ihraam made them all equal in the eyes of Allah, covering all surface indications of wealth and position — or lack of either.

There was a kind of irony in my being in Jidda at this time. In a way I, too, was a pilgrim, only my pilgrimages were never holy ones. On my pilgrimages I sought not good but evil. My pilgrim’s garb, the clothes of a casual tourist, hid things from the eyes of man, not Allah. In her special shoulder-holster, Wilhelmina, my high-powered Luger, cradled her 9 mm shells; and in a narrow sheath strapped to my forearm, Hugo’s thin blade of tempered steel rested silent and efficient. These were the things my pilgrim’s garb hid, the tools of the trade for Nick Carter, AXE Agent N3, Killmaster. My passport held my cover identity of Ted Wilson, importer.

So I tried to put aside the uneasiness that was making me so restless, to explain it away rationally when, down deep, I knew there was no rational explanation. And then I saw the girl again.

During midday devotions I stayed in my room at the hotel, listening to the sound of the mutawwa’, the religious policeman, banging on shutters to speed their closing for prayers. By the time the muezzin’s call rang out from the minaret, silence covered the city. I watched the overhead fan slowly revolve and forced myself not to think of why I was here, not to think of Fred Danvers and my meeting with him scheduled for tomorrow, when he returned from his trip to Medina. When devotions ended and the streets flooded with noisy throngs, I went outside. That’s when I saw the girl again.

She had stopped at a stand in the souk — the market — only a few steps ahead of me and stood fingering bolts of shimmering brocades and brilliant silks. She half-turned and looked back at me with those eyes of cool blue, and once more I felt something in her glance. A line of donkeys bearing clay water urns cut in front of me, blocking both sight and movement. When they had passed, she was gone.

The uneasy tension that had never really left me flared up, and I knew the girl was at least partly responsible. There was something in her eyes, something I saw but couldn’t read. I tried to shake off the edgy feeling; it was bringing me close to a mean, ugly mood that sometimes took over when I got like this. I thought about Hawk’s answer to my last question at the meeting in his office.

“Why me?” I had asked, and he had answered me immediately:

“Because you’ll call it the way it is and to hell with feelings like mercy and kindness and compassion, and that’s the way I want it.”

My lips tightened, remembering, as I wandered the narrow, teeming streets of Jidda. If that was the way Hawk wanted it, that’s how he’d get it. Maybe his answer had been a kind of compliment, but it was hardly the kind you had framed and hung on the wall.

So here I was, Ted Wilson, importer, visiting the marketplace where Arabs haggled over brass incense burners, coffee pots, sandals and rolls of carpet. And then I saw the girl for the third time. I was passing under the terraced wall of a building when a shower of dirt and leaves cascaded down around me and a flower pot crashed and broke on the cobblestones. I looked up and the girl was there, hanging half over the stone fluted edge of a second-floor terrace lined with flower pots.

And this time she was not alone. As I gazed up, I glimpsed a man in a white hat and a white suit. He had one hand around her neck and another over her mouth and was trying to drag her back from the edge. The girl, her blue eyes wide with fright, clung to the ledge with both hands and tried to get a muffled scream free. As I watched, the man snapped her head back. She lost her grip on the ledge and disappeared out of sight with him.

Always a Boy Scout at heart, I headed for a narrow flight of outside steps at the end of the building. They led up to the terrace, and I took them three at a time, spinning around the corner at the top to see the white-suited man, thick-bodied and swarthy, holding the girl on the ground. She was still trying to get back and her skirt was up, revealing gorgeous legs and white, ruffled bikini panties.

Behind the man in the white suit towered a huge, brown-skinned figure wearing only a short cloth vest and ragged trousers. The giant’s face was wide with high cheekbones and his head was completely bald. A large, gold earring hung from one ear. Beneath the short open vest I saw a beautifully muscled body of rippling flesh, the body of a jungle cat — about six-foot-four of jungle cat, I estimated.

His bald head shone in the hot sun, and his eyes, deep and dark, flashed when he saw me at the top of the stairs. The other man tossed the girl at him and then started for me. Heavy-faced, with a wide nose, he growled as he moved forward.

“Get out of here,” he rumbled.

I didn’t waste breath asking questions I knew wouldn’t be answered. “Show me the door,” I said.

He hesitated, then charged, bull-like. I met the wild rush with a sharp, neat left that caught him on the point of his jaw, followed it up with a right cross. He staggered, his eyes crossed and he went down.

I looked up to see the brown giant throw the girl down, hard, then he stepped over her and came at me. He, I knew, would be something else. He came in lightly on the balls of his feet, his long, lithe body moving with powerful ease.

He shot out a quick left, which I avoided. He tried two more and I circled, moving against the low wall of the terrace. I saw an opening and shot out a hard left which I expected he would try to duck. He didn’t; it landed with jarring force. His head snapped back and my follow-up right would have been perfect, if I hadn’t stepped on a broken flower pot on the stone flooring.

My foot slipped, and the blow landed with only half the force it should have. But — my eyebrows shot up — the big bruiser went sailing backwards to crash into a rubber plant and collapse in front of it. He lay there, shaking his head, making no move to rise.

“I’ll be damned,” I muttered. “All those muscles and nothing behind them.” I felt a hand on my arm and turned to look into big blue eyes.

“Please, let’s go,” the girl was saying, pulling at me. “Hurry, before they wake up. Please.”

I let her lead me down the outside steps, paused to glance back at the giant and saw him slowly starting to get to one knee. I shook my head again in amazement. You can never tell by looks, I know, but usually they fool you the other way around: an easy-looking touch turns out to be a roaring fury. I gave him a last glance and left, feeling cheated and vaguely bothered. But the girl was running, and I ran after her as she cut through a side alleyway and onto a broad, busy street, finally pausing at the corner of a mosque. Her eyes, their expression cool and composed again, gazed up at me.

“Thank you,” she said, breathing deeply, her breasts rising and falling against the clinging silk of her blouse. “They told me they’d get even with me, but I didn’t believe them.”

I caught the faint trace of a Swedish accent in her speech.

“Get even for what?” I asked

“Last week I was at a nightclub where I should not have gone alone,” she explained. “The smaller one came over and propositioned me. He was very aggressive, and I finally had to call a policeman and have him arrested. The big one told me they would get even with me, but I just dismissed the whole incident.”

Her hand on my arm tightened. “If you hadn’t come, I hate to think what might have happened.” She shivered. “Here in Jidda, so much goes on that people look the other way.”

“Jidda’s not so different from a lot of cities in the States then.” I grinned at her.

“You are American?” she said. “My name is Anise, Anise Hulden. I work for Tour-Guide Trips here in Jidda. They employ many girls from many countries who know different languages.”

I nodded. I’d come across the name during my self-briefing session before leaving Washington. Self-briefing was a firm AXE rule, to be waived only if circumstances made it impossible. A special set of files and films coordinated by a special technique allowed us to mentally absorb, catalogue and store away a tremendous amount of information on any given place. Tour-Guide Trips, I recalled, was another of Ibn Hassouk’s enterprises.

“My name’s Wilson,” I said. “Ted Wilson, imports and exports. I’m glad I was around to help.”

I felt a delightful pressure on my arm and found that Anise had stepped closer; the soft underside of her breasts was resting against my forearm.

“Just to say thank you like this hardly seems enough,” she said, the cool blue eyes gazing steadily at me. If ever I’d heard an opening, this was it, and I didn’t waste time. Hell, I had a whole evening to kill ahead of me.

“Then have dinner with me tonight and give me the extra-special tour of town,” I proposed.

She broke into a wide smile. The reaction was so fast it seemed mechanical. An occupational reflex, probably. “Wonderful, Ted,” she said. “Number five, Aran Street. Shall we say eight-thirty?”

“We shall.” I nodded. “See you then.”

“I must hurry back to work,” she said. A subtle change had come into her eyes, a pleased, rather satisfied expression. Or was I imagining things? She reached up, brushed my cheek with her lips and hurried off. I watched her full figure, backside tight in the straight line of the blue skirt, until I lost her in the crowd.

I glanced about, thinking her two assailants might still be around, but they seemed to have done a fast disappearing act. I grunted, remembering how the big one had just come apart after one half-hearted blow. Maybe I was disappointed that all that grace and muscular beauty covered such a hollow shell of a man. It kept bothering me in a low-keyed way, and I was still thinking about it when I arrived back at the Hotel Nomad.

I stopped at an outdoor coffeehouse, one of the numerous gahwas serving the strong, cardamom-flavored Arabian coffee. I stayed there, watching the passing scene, until I heard the cry of “Salaat! Salaat! Sa-laaaaat!” It was time for evening prayer, the last of the five times a day the Moslem pauses to turn toward Mecca. I went to my room and stretched out on the bed and tried to relax, let the edginess that was still with me drift away. It wouldn’t, though, stubbornly refusing, and finally it was time to shower and change and pick up Anise.

The address was in one of Jidda’s better sections. Anise greeted me at the door of her apartment. She had rented it furnished, she told me, as I glanced around at the hassocks, thick rugs and wooden chairs. A low wide divan was covered with a thick goatskin blanket. But it was Anise who held my glance longest. She had put on a simple black dress with spaghetti straps that made the blond creaminess of her skin shimmer, very mini and very low cut with a square neck out of which the rise of her breasts ballooned tantalizingly. When she slid her arms around my neck and kissed me, her lips soft, opening on mine, I caught the mingled scent of jasmine and roses.

“A down payment on my thank you,” she said, moving back quickly, and I saw her appraising my build from under lowered lashes — the width of my shoulders, the narrowness of my hips. Finally, she picked up a downy white sweater, linked her arm through mine and we walked out, and I thought I had a better-than-fair chance to throw off my uneasiness at last. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Anise gave me a damned good tour of all the better nightspots, and there wasn’t a place we entered where heads didn’t turn to look at her, at the magnificent legs and pyramided blond hair and the generous breasts thrusting against the square neck of the simple dress. Anise, I found out, liked to drink and quickly took on a real glow. The pressure of her thigh against mine, as we sat at some table, grew more pronounced with every stop we made.

We watched belly dancers, the good ones, the real ones, and had Arabian food and stopped in the almost pitch-black places where erotic performances interrupted the customers toying with each other. All in all, I should have been having a helluva good time. But I wasn’t. There were the little things, the damned little things which would have gone unnoticed by the average man. But through the years you learn to listen to the little things, or you never get to hear the big ones.

The little things were adding up to nothing, yet they were there. For instance, I noticed that Anise seemed to have mapped out a definite itinerary. Nothing wrong in that, but when I suggested something different midway through the evening, she wouldn’t hear of it. Her reaction, sharp and sudden, was instantly covered by a dazzling smile and a hug.

“Let’s stick to my way,” she said and laughed. “Remember, I’m the tour guide specialist, Ted.”

True enough. I shrugged, and the moment passed. But then there were the nervous glances I saw her give from time to time, and I finally mentioned them.

“I still keep seeing those two men,” she said. “I keep expecting them to pop up someplace I’m sorry.”

Completely reasonable and believable, so why the hell didn’t I buy it? Maybe because it was part of a pattern, like the way she slipped a fast glance at her watch just before she suggested that we move on to the next spot.

Little things, little, meaningless mannerisms, perhaps occupational habits, that the ordinary date wouldn’t even notice. Hell, I told myself, maybe I was the one with the occupational habit. It was getting pretty bad when you couldn’t just go out and enjoy yourself with a beautiful, charming companion. I should have been relaxed and at ease. Why wasn’t I?

I pushed away the answers that kept trying to work their way forward in my mind and concentrated on Anise’s sensuousness. That wasn’t hard, and when she finally suggested I take her home, I was feeling growing pangs of excited anticipation.

When we reached her place, she turned on only one dim lamp. Her eyes were no longer cool but burning with a hungry restlessness, and her lips found mine in a brief, tongue-tipped kiss which said it all. Words would have been superfluous. She turned and walked into the bathroom. But even now, even here, the damned little things intruded.

I’d known many girls in many cities who had chain locks on their doors, and all of them immediately slipped the chain on when they came in. It was automatic, like breathing in and breathing out. But not Anise. The chain lock was there, I saw, but she never touched it.

I sat down on the wide divan covered by the soft goatskin blanket and waited quietly, my mind racing, going over each and every one of the little things. I still hadn’t figured anything out when Anise emerged from the bathroom, wearing only the white bikini panties. Her bare breasts were Rubenesque in their proportions. The provocative odor of jasmine and roses filled the room.

She sank down beside me on the soft blanket, flicked off the lamp, and the room was bathed in a blue nightlight of soft phosphoreseuce. I ran my fingers lightly over one large breast, and she grabbed me and pulled me to her. My eyes held hers and, little things or no little things, she wasn’t faking the fervid desire I saw in them.

I lifted myself from her and stood up. Moving slowly, holding my own desires back, I walked to a chair and took off my clothes, shoes first, then pants and shirt. I slipped Wilhelmina and Hugo under the fold of my shirt, laying it on top of my pants.

As I started back toward the divan, I “accidentally” pushed one shoe against the door, putting it tight up to the threshold. Then I moved quickly to Anise, lowering my body onto hers, feeling the tingling ecstasy of skin against skin, desire inflaming desire.

Anise Hulden wanted desperately to make love, unmistakably so, and her body rose up to meet mine as a deep groan escaped her. Her arms locked around my back in a viselike grip, and she began to move beneath me with a strangely hurried, frantic motion, a determined frenzy of commanding proportions. There was none of the delightful foreplay with Anise, nothing to prepare for the delicious moments of rapture; she wanted no part of prolonged sensations. Her arms behind my back pulled me forward, and she flung herself upward, straining, hurrying, pleading with her every motion for the peak of peaks.

I bore down, almost angrily, matching her hurried, unsubtle insistence. Then, through the harsh sound of her breathing and the singular concentration of my own passions, I heard it: the slow scraping of my shoe on the floor. The door was being opened. Anise’s arms around my back held their tight grip, and she didn’t pause in her fervid straining and pushing. Tensing every muscle, I rolled to the left, trying to dislodge her, but she held on. I flipped her over on top of me, and saw her eyes widen and her mouth drop open.

“No!” she cried out in sudden terror, but it came too late. I heard shots ring out, two of them, felt Anise shudder as the two slugs slammed into her back. Looking past her as she stiffened, the large breasts pulled up tautly, I saw the gun barrel pulled back from the door opening, then I heard footsteps running off.

I tossed Anise from me and raced for the door, pausing only to grab Wilhelmina on the way. Stark naked, I reached the top of the stairs to see two figures running out the front door, one squat, white-suited, the other tall, brown-skinned, bare-chested and bald. I halted on the top step, not because of my nakedness but because I knew they’d be out of sight in the dark, twisting streets before I could even reach the doorway.

Turning, I walked back into the room where Anise Hidden lay face down on the goatskin blanket, two large red stains spreading across her back to become one. I turned her over and saw there was still breath in her. Her eyelids fluttered, never quite opening, and her lips made small, hardly audible sounds. I leaned closer to hear her strained words.

“Rot in hell!” she gasped, raising her head a fraction of an inch. Then, with a final shudder, she fell back and lay still, a magnificent body beyond human claim now. I dressed and left, not looking back, a sour, bitter taste in my mouth.

All the little things fitted together. The killers had meant their bullets for me, and Anise had been a part of the scheme from the very beginning, from the first exchange of glances at the airport. I hadn’t misread what I’d seen in her eyes then. It had been recognition — of the intended victim. And after I’d rescued her from the phony attack, that look of satisfaction I’d glimpsed in her eyes had been real enough. It meant everything was going according to plan. I grunted. I knew now why the beautifully muscled giant had collapsed so easily when I barely hit him. It had all been part of the elaborate scheme to set me up for easy killing. But why? Was it just the old con game, Saudi Arabian version, with me as the patsy, the unsuspecting victim to be murdered and robbed? Probably, I told myself. Probably. I couldn’t bring myself to say definitely.

When I reached the hotel, I stretched out on the bed in my room and thought about the importance of little things. If it hadn’t been for them I’d be dead, killed before my mission here had even begun. Had I really been just a pigeon picked at random for a deadly version of the old confidence game? Or was there a connection somewhere?

They had made a strange trio, the striking, blond Swedish girl, the short, thick, swarthy man and the muscular bald, brown giant. But this was a strange land, a land where the bizarre was commonplace, where only the usual was unusual.

I was still wondering about it when I dropped off to sleep under the slow-turning blades of the fan on the ceiling.

Chapter 2

At the airport I was told that flight 443 from Medina would be fifteen minutes late, and I made my way through the melange of the terminal lobby so typical of this strange land.

An Arab chief sat beside his armed bodyguard, who carried a submachine gun and a pearl-handled dagger. Two American oil company men, as unmistakable in their looks and manners as any desert sheik, sat across from the burnoosed chief. Veiled women in their haiks glided by alongside coiffed and manicured European women. Caftans and Christian Diors, burnooses and Balmains, transistor radios and prayer rugs; and it all hung together in a crazy, unreal kind of way.

I found a chair near the big picture window overlooking the runways, and as I watched planes take off and land, the scene faded away and I was back in the unobtrusive office at DuPont Circle, Washington, D.C., watching Hawk pace the floor, not even chewing on his usual unlit cigar.

Whenever Hawk paced that way I knew he was deeply, personally bothered. His lean, weathered face seemed to take on new lines, and he looked more like a Baptist preacher musing on the evils of sin than the shrewd, canny, brilliant director of AXE.

“I don’t know what to think, Nick,” he was saying. “I just don’t know what to think. I feel sick about the whole dirty, rotten business. I feel betrayed and, if the truth be known, it hurts.”

I knew how the old man hurt. It wasn’t merely that he ran a tight ship, a super-efficient espionage agency, but all his key men were handpicked, the product of years of training and work. Besides, disloyalty was a word Hawk really didn’t comprehend, an attitude so far beyond his understanding that he could never come to grips with it in his own people. I tried the soothing approach instead of my usual bantering.

“Why let it get to you before you know for sure it’s true?” I said.

“Because what I do know is more than enough to get to me, dammit,” he barked back. “Hell, you know Fred Danvers. You’ve worked through his people. You know how long he’s been with AXE.”

I nodded. Fred Danvers was older than the other AXE agents, married, wife and kids in the States, one of the first men placed by Hawk when AXE was created.

“Danvers has been sitting out there in that desert crossroads for years,” Hawk went on. “He’s built up one helluva network of informants and contacts. There isn’t much that goes on in southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East he doesn’t know about. Political moves, military shifts, troop movements, assassination plots, secret coups — you name it, it passes through Fred Danvers in Saudi Arabia. The place is a regular clearinghouse for vital information and, of course, we’ve used him to transmit messages and information outside of the regular channels.”

“And now things have been going wrong,” I put in and saw Hawk’s lips tighten.

“Very wrong,” he answered. “Deals we had set have gone sour. Secret information has turned up in the wrong hands. Contemplated moves have been blocked because someone found out about them.”

“All stuff that went through Fred Danvers, I take it,” I said. “But you know such things could be the result of a hundred different reasons.”

Hawk nailed me with a piercing look, and I winced. “Dammit, Nick,” he snapped, “if I were positive, if I had one shred of confirmative evidence I wouldn’t need to send you out there to get to the bottom of this.”

“Yes, sir,” I said quietly. Hawk went to his desk and sat down behind it, his steel-gray eyes still glaring at me from beneath the furrowed brow.

“We planted a piece of phony material recently,” he said. “We gave it to Fred Danvers in the usual manner.”

“And it turned up where it shouldn’t have,” I finished for him. He leaned back and looked tired and more than a little sad, suddenly.

“It tinned up exactly where we thought it might,” he said. “I decided then that I couldn’t pass off any more excuses to myself. In this seat, Nick, I can’t afford the luxury of looking the other way — not for Fred Danvers, not for myself, not for anyone.” He lapsed into a long moment of silent withdrawal and then he went on, bringing himself back to business abruptly, talking in that crisp, familiar, no-nonsense tone.

“Get out there and find out what the hell’s going on,” he ordered. “I want facts, facts! If it isn’t Fred Danvers, then find out who or what it is. Somewhere there’s a big leak. And if it is Fred Danvers...”

He left the sentence unfinished, but I knew what he meant. If it were Fred Danvers, if the man had gone wrong, then I was to take whatever steps were necessary. I could return him to Washington or, if I couldn’t, there’d be a minimum of questions asked about his death. I recalled something Hawk had said to me a long time ago: “A good agent gone bad is like a dog turned sheep-killer. He’ll always be a sheep-killer, and you’ll never break him of it. You either have to keep him confined or get rid of him. In either case, he’s a liability, not an asset.” I hoped, for Hawk’s sake if nothing else, that Fred Danvers had not turned traitor.

My meeting with Hawk had ended on that note. He’d given me my cover identity papers for Ted Wilson, importer, and I’d been dispatched and Danvers notified that I was coming. If the man was in the clear, he’d welcome seeing me. If he wasn’t, he could very well smell trouble. Danvers was no fool; he knew I wasn’t sent some place without a damned good reason...

My reverie was suddenly exploded by the blaring of the airport public address system: “Flight 443 from Medina arriving at Gate Two,” a girl’s voice said, and repeated the announcement.

I got up and made my way to Gate Two and waited as the plane disembarked its passengers. I saw Arab chiefs with their wives, some foreign students, a group of German tourists, a couple of moustached Englishmen, two trim hostesses and, finally, the flight crew. No Fred Danvers. My jaw tightened. Of course, he could have missed the flight for one reason or another, but somehow I knew that wasn’t the case. I don’t know how I knew, I just did. It was confirmed a few moments later as I walked slowly away from the gate. The public address system blared again and this time broadcasted my cover name all over the airport.

“Will Mr. Ted Wilson go to the mail desk, please,” the voice said, cool, impersonal. “Will Mr. Ted Wilson go to the mail desk, please. A letter for him has been delivered on flight four-four-three.”

The voice began to repeat the message as I changed direction and started back across the terminal lobby. I had gotten about a quarter of the way across when a girl carrying a suitcase and pulling more in a small shopping Cart cut in front of me, stumbled and fell toward me. I fended off two pullman cases and a ladies’ overnight bag and caught the girl in my arms as she came tumbling along with them. Small, dark eyed and olive-skinned, she gasped in embarrassment and some pain as I pulled her to her feet. The luggage lay scattered about on the floor and airport porters started to converge on the scene.

“I’m so sorry,” she apologized.

“That’s all right.” I smiled at her. “I’ve been hit with worse things.” I started to step over the suitcases when I felt her hand on my arm.

“Wait, please,” she said. “Are you sure you’re not hurt? I wouldn’t want to be responsible for your being hurt.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Believe me.” I started off again, but her hand tightened on my arm.

“Wait. Let me give you a phone number where I can be reached,” she said. “If you find out you’re hurt, please call me. I’m insured for this sort of thing.”

“No need,” I said again. “I’m perfectly fine.” I gave her another reassuring smile. She hesitated, then shrugged and let go of my arm. I hurried on through the porters now busily picking up her bags. The young clerk at the mail desk, an Arab in western dress, looked up as I approached.

“I’m Ted Wilson,” I said. “You have a letter for me that arrived on flight four-four-three.” He looked at me in some surprise and then frowned. “But Mr. Wilson just picked up that letter, sir,” he said.

Chapter 3

My blood went into a deep freeze, my cover was blown.

“A Mr. Wilson just picked up the letter?” I repeated.

“Yes, sir,” the young clerk said, his expression earnest, concerned. “He showed me an identification card. Has there been some error?”

“There sure as hell has!” I shot out. “What did he look like? Where did he go?”

“A stocky man, wearing a white suit,” the clerk said. “And he just went out the main door there.” He nodded.

I whirled to see the door still revolving, and Mr. Wilson took off after Mr. Wilson with murder in his heart. As I hit the revolving door I shot a glance back into the lobby. The girl had disappeared, but the bags were still scattered about, as I’d figured. She’d been a delaying action to give someone else time to get to the mail desk, flash a phony identity card and pick up the letter.

It was dawning on me that a very smooth operation was at work here. I had been no stray tourist picked at random by Anise Hulden and her companions. That was clear now. They’d known about my coming long enough to have identification cards made up. Every bit of this had been carefully planned and carefully executed. Someone very much wanted to keep me from checking out Fred Danvers. Maybe Fred Danvers?

The revolving door flung me out on the sidewalk where I glimpsed a white suit behind the wheel of an English Ford that roared from the curb, tires squealing protest. A few yards away an airline courier was getting off his Honda super Hawk motorcycle.

“Sorry, friend,” I said, as I clipped him neatly behind the ear with Wilhelmina and lowered him to the ground. I hit the seat and the throttle at the same instant, and the bike roared off, leaping forward like an angry stallion. I threaded my way through throngs of people, donkeys, camels and crowded buses full of pilgrims on the final leg of their pilgrimage.

The English Ford was not too far ahead, bulling its way through traffic. I swerved suddenly and cut down a side street. I followed and saw that the street was considerably less crowded, and white suit had opened up. I gunned the Honda, leaning close in as we took another corner.

White Suit had seen me by now; he was taking corners on two wheels, cutting back and forth along the edges of the city but heading north and west toward the coast. When we hit the open road outside of town I could have caught him, but I certainly couldn’t force him off the road with the motorcycle. Besides, he was going somewhere and I wanted to see where. Maybe all the answers I needed were in that letter. I had a hunch they might be. The letter had come in place of Fred Danvers, and that could mean a helluva lot of things, none of them reassuring.

I could smell the Red Sea now, with its unusually high salt content, and then it came into view, a flat, hazy stretch in the heat of the morning sun. The English Ford swung onto a dirt road between two sand mounds. I tracked it more by the trailing cloud of dust than by sight. The road led directly down to the shoreline. As White Suit hit the firm sand along the water’s edge, he turned the car and drove along the line of lapping waves. I stayed on his tail, and then I saw the small boat a hundred yards or so offshore, a dinghy with an outboard. In it I glimpsed a muscular brown giant, bald pate shining in the sun.

The Ford slammed to a halt. White suit leaped from the car and ran for the water, and I heard the dinghy’s outboard roar into life. I skidded the Honda to a stop, showering sand into the air. White Suit was wading right out into the sea; he was almost waist-deep in the water already and the dinghy was heading in for him. It was obviously a fast sloping bottom where the shallow draught of the dinghy would permit it to come in close. I hit the water running, sending spray scattering. I saw White Suit turn to look back at me, then shoot a glance at the position of the boat. He obviously decided he’d have to deal with me before the boat could reach him.

He came forward, chest-high in the waters of the Red Sea, and as I reached him he swung, a clumsy, short-armed blow. I pulled away from it, grabbed his arm and spun him around. But his short thick body had the compact, raw strength of a bull; he jackknifed forward, going underwater, and I was propelled over his head.

I swallowed some of the Red Sea, closed my mouth and came up for air. White Suit was bulling into me again, but this time I got an arm out of the water and clipped him with a sharp left hook over the eye. He staggered backwards and fell, the water closing over his head. I dove for him, but he scrambled backwards and avoided my lunge. I came up for air, saw him frantically moving out into deeper water, and now I saw the outboard not more than a dozen feet away.

The bald giant one was gunning the craft straight at me, the outboard roaring full out. I dived and hit bottom. The dinghy’s hull passed not more than a few inches above me. As I came up for air, I saw the boat turning, heading back for another pass. White Suit had moved out of the way and was standing by to let his pal run me down, and crush my skull or cave in my chest.

I had other ideas. I had Wilhelmina out now. I took a shot at the bald head, but the boat was bouncing at full throttle and I was at a bad angle. The Shot missed, and I cursed as I saw the giant slide to the bottom of the boat, an almost impossible target now. I thrust Wilhelmina back into her holster and dived as the dinghy roared directly at me again.

This time I felt the thrust of the whirring propeller blades as they just missed my back. I surfaced instantly and brought Wilhelmina out again. This playing tag with an outboard was dangerous business. I’d tire before long, for one thing, and one slight miscalculation and I’d have a smashed body.

But the big bruiser was steering from the bottom of the dinghy, only peering out in quick glances. I didn’t bother trying for him again but put two neat holes, almost side by side, through the dinghy below the waterline. The boat skittered and veered off, then began circling for another pass at me.

I waited a moment, then put two more shots close together into the hull. I could picture the water rushing in. They were only small holes but there were four of them now, and it doesn’t take much of a hole to sink a dinghy. The boat turned sharply, veered off to the right, and I tensed, watching, ready to dive as soon as I figured out the giant’s next move. But the dinghy swung around and took off, heading up the shoreline, throttle full out. I heard a yell from White Suit, a mixture of surprise and rage.

“No!” he screamed. “Come back! Back, damn you! Don’t leave me!” But the outboard, seemingly without a pilot, as the giant continued to steer from the bottom of the boat, kept going away in a straight line. It was a hasty retreat to avoid sinking here and having to face Wilhelmina. He could get far enough away before he’d have to ditch the dinghy, but I still had White Suit, and he still had the letter.

He had stopped cursing after the retreating outboard and had turned to face me, his heavy jaw set, a crafty gleam in his small eyes. Suddenly he started a splashing, heavy-legged run for the shore. I cut him off easily as he emerged waist-high in the water.

“That’s far enough,” I said, waving Wilhelmina at him. “Let’s have the letter.”

I watched as he reached into his wet pocket and brought out a business envelope. Then, before I realized what he was up to, he flipped the envelope into the sea, sending it sailing with a twist of his wrist. I watched it hit the water, lie there for an instant and then begin to sink. White Suit was splashing for the beach and the Ford, again, bargaining his escape against the letter, figuring I’d try for the letter and let him get away. But I crossed him up. I went after him, putting Wilhelmina away, and caught him in knee-deep water. He tinned and I drove him back with a whistling right. He landed with a loud splash. I was on him instantly, lifting him up with my left hand as I slammed him again with the right. He arched backwards and landed, unconscious. I raised his head out of the water and gave him another right that turned him over; he floated face down.

I ran back to where I’d seen the letter disappear and made a flat dive, moving along the sandy bottom to where it dropped steeply. I was grateful for the brilliance of the hot Arabian sun that penetrated deep into the water. I had to surface once for air, then dived down again. I hoped the incoming motion of the water had kept the envelope from being swept further out, and my hope paid off. I saw it, lying on the sandy bottom, rocking gently with the flow of the water.

Grasping it by a corner, I surfaced and struck out for shore. When I felt bottom under me, I stood up and tore open the water-soaked, wet envelope. Dammit! Dammit to hell! It wasn’t typed, as I’d expected, but handwritten in ink — ink that was, for the most part, running, smeared and largely unreadable. Quickly, I read what I could still make out, saying the words aloud as I read them:

“Tell Hawk... all these years... not... to take one’s life... welcome... you decide... forgive.” That was all I could deciper. The rest was illegible except for the signature: “Fred.”

So Danvers had taken his own life. Other than that bit of information, I had only acquired the letter itself, which was a lot of nothing. Frustration made me furious. I shoved the letter into my pocket and strode to where White Suit still lay, half-submerged in water. Cursing him, I dragged him onto the dry sand of the beach and tore his jacket off. Straddling the squat, thick body, I started to give him artificial respiration. If he could be brought back, I was going to do it.

Maybe because I was so furious at being cheated out of the letter that I refused to give up, or maybe because of his barrel-chest, I suddenly felt his body shudder, just as I thought my arms were about to drop off. I let up and his chest heaved as he threw up what seemed like a gallon of the Red Sea. I helped him to a kneeling position. Before long he was beginning to breathe more normally and the death-white chalkiness was leaving his face. I saw the crafty look creeping back into his eyes, and that was all I needed. I grabbed him by the shirt, knotted the fabric up under his Adam’s apple until his eyes began to bulge.

“Now you tell me what you know, or I’ll choke you to death second by second,” I growled. He read the look in my eyes and realized I wasn’t just trying to scare him but giving him the facts of life.

“I don’t know anything,” he said; his accent was Portuguese. “Believe me, I don’t know anything about what was in the letter.”

I turned the wet knot tighter, and he gasped, “Believe me, please! I just work, do what Tomas tells me.”

“Who’s Tomas?” I asked. “The bald bruiser with the muscles?”

He nodded between gasps. I tightened the knot again, and he began to turn blue. “What was in the letter?” I repeated.

“Dia!” he choked out, “I don’t know.”

“Why did you and your pal, Tomas, and the girl try to kill me?” I asked.

“All I... is... Tomas and the girl said you must... be killed,” he gasped.

“Tomas knows things, doesn’t he?” I said, and he managed to nod. There was a look of terror in his eyes, and I knew he was telling the truth. I’d seen such fear before in men’s eyes. You to learn to recognize the real thing, and when you see it, you know damned well the man’s past lying.

This stupid oaf was a hired hand and nothing more, a minor cog, an expendable employee, and I knew another reason why the bald giant had taken off. He knew that this one had nothing to tell. But a thought was taking fast shape in my mind. Tomas, and whoever he worked for, wouldn’t know whether the letter was readable or not. For all they knew, I’d gotten it and read every last word and knew the whole story. Without this oaf to tell them differently, I had the top seat, for a while, at least. Whatever was in that letter, whatever this was all about, was damned important, important enough to include murder.

I looked at the man in front of me. He’d been involved in two attempts on my life, had taken part in the girl’s killing. He was expendable to his bosses, and I was going to accommodate them. The world could only improve without him.

He must have read the thought in my cold, icy stare, or maybe it was only the instinctive awareness of death that comes over all animals at the moment of truth. He gave a hoarse cry and tore away from me, the wet shirt ripping, in a last burst of frenzied strength. He tried to race for the Ford, but I caught him before he’d taken two strides. I spun him around, and my punch knocked him six feet back into the surf. I followed him and brought a vicious karate chop down on the back of his neck. He dropped, face down in the water which swirled over his body. I walked away, knowing the Red Sea would reclaim the victim I’d cheated it of.

I paused to examine the English Ford, saw the car rental sticker on the dash board. It would, I knew, have been rented under a false name, not worth the bother to check out. I got on the Honda, turned the throttle on and started back to Jidda. The wind was hot against my face, and by the time I reached the city, my clothes were virtually dry. I left the bike near the airport, knowing it’s owner would have the police out looking for it by now, and went back to the hotel.

In my room, I brought out the bottle of bourbon I carry with me whenever possible. I stripped, changed to dry shorts and sipped bourbon on the rocks, while I thought about what had happened and tried to fit some of the pieces together.

Another look at the letter revealed nothing more, but from what there was, it seemed plain that Fred Danvers had killed himself. It was also plain that a man like Danvers wouldn’t do that unless there was no other way out, unless he was in too deep. And it had to be more than a simple, personal problem like a gambling debt say. The big-money boys could be ruthless I knew, but they wouldn’t care if Danvers wrote me a letter of confession. They wouldn’t much care how long I snooped around uncovering the fact that he was in debt.

No, this thing had a smell to it, a dirty, devious smell. In taking his own life, Danvers no doubt knew it was only a matter of time before whoever he was mixed up with did it for him. But the very bigness of whatever was behind this would now work in my favor. They would have to come after me.

I wasn’t going to sit back and wait for them to make their move. Danvers was dead, but I had the address of his house on the outskirts of Jidda, and AXE files had told me he had a secretary. I’d see what those leads tinned up. But first, I had to get a call in to Hawk. I finished the bourbon, savoring the last of it as it trickled down my throat, dressed and went out. A few blocks from the hotel I found a small notions ship with a public phone. I put in a collect call to Hawk. Happily the lines were clear, and I had almost no wait at all before I heard his clear, clipped voice. It wasn’t a scrambled line, so I spoke guardedly.

“Danvers quit the hard way,” I said. “By himself.”

There was a moment’s pause, then Hawk said quietly, “I understand.” There was a tinge of sadness in his voice.

“I never got to talk to him,” I went on. “I’ve been very busy.” That, I thought grimly, was a helluva description for being set up for murder, shot at, nearly run over by a boat and having my cover blown sky high.

“It appears I was expected,” I said. “A letter for me never was delivered properly.”

Hawk coughed. “I trust you’ll carry through,” he said. “I think you ought to recall something... Willard Egmont, British Intelligence.”

He left it there, knowing I didn’t need anymore, and we hung up. I recalled Willard Egmont and the incident surrounding him. A good man in British Intelligence, in Hong Kong, he had taken his own life some two years back, and no explanation for the unexpected act had ever been uncovered. There’d been some talk that he was to be recalled for questioning, but it had not gone that far at the time of his suicide. Disconnected, unrelated events? Perhaps. And perhaps not. Hawk obviously wondered too.

I walked out of the notions shop into the afternoon sun. Before going to visit the house Fred Danvers had rented for so many years, I decided to stop at the offices of Tour-Guide Trips. A line on Anise Hulden might turn up something of more than passing interest.

Chapter 4

Tour-Guide Trips was a large room behind plate glass windows furnished with a waist-high counter, Swedish-modern office furniture and occupied by three girls and a man. The man could have been East Indian, Indonesian, even Filippino — it was hard to tell. He was brown-skinned with fine features and an expression in his eyes that was something else than heterosexual.

The three girls were each very different, but all wore the white blouse and dark-blue skirt Anise Hulden had worn, apparently the Tour-Guide Trip uniform. One girl was small and olive-skinned, Greek perhaps; another was tall but small-busted, with brown hair and nondescript features, English, I guessed. The third was a dark blond with a wide mouth and the finely chiseled lips and flat cheekbones of Belgian women.

But it was their eyes that drew my attention most. They were all strangely alike in their cool, distant, somehow veiled expression, the same expression I’d seen in Anise Hulden’s eyes.

Tour-Guide Trips turned out to be a place of polite answers, mechanically perfect smiles, and absolutely no information.

Did they know Miss Hidden? Yes, but she was I no longer with them. When had she left? It was hard to remember, perhaps a few weeks ago. I made a mental note that, in that case, she still hadn’t changed from the white-blouse-dark-blue-skirt uniform. Where could I find Miss Hulden now? They didn’t know. Who might know? They had no idea. Who hired her? Mr. Ibn Hassouk did all the hiring himself. Had the police been asking about her? No, why should they? No, she hadn’t left a forwarding address. No, they hardly knew her. No, no, no to everything.

I was shadow-boxing, being turned aside with deft, deferential politeness. Everything was cool, calm and absolutely noncommittal. I could have been asking about the rate of exchange of the riyal. But they fielded everything too smoothly, and when I walked out of the place into the stifling heat I had made one decision. Since Ibn Hassouk owned the place and, according to them, did all the hiring personally, I would pay Ibn Hassouk a little visit soon. Tour-Guide Trips had left a definite taste in my mouth, a bitter, sour taste.

Meanwhile, I had Fred Danvers’ house to visit, and I sought a taxi. I walked six blocks before finding one, and by that time my shirt was wet with perspiration and sticking to me like flypaper. I gave the driver the address, just outside the city proper. The cab, an ancient English Austin, started out uncertainly, coughing its way into life. Throngs of pilgrims choked the road, and progress was painfully slow until the driver turned into a side road, hardly much more than a sandy trail.

The heat shimmered in the distance where large groves of olive trees separated the city from the desert, a wavy, sun-reflected atmospheric curtain. As I stared into it I found myself remembering things about Fred Danvers.

I’d worked with him twice, or at least used his knowledge and help on two missions, and I recalled that there had been a diffident, shy air about the man which cloaked a tremendous shrewdness. He had a family in the States, a wife and two daughters; his wife had elected to remain in America because she thought it better for the children’s education. She visited Danvers at least twice a year, and I had the impression that he almost preferred it that way.

There had never been any involvement with other women that had come into his record. He had seemed typical of a certain breed of career man, living a neatly compartmented life. But now his face materialized for a moment in the shimmering heat waves — pleasant, genial, a small, reddish moustache giving him a slightly rakish air — and I recalled one night when we’d gone out for a few drinks how his glance had absolutely devoured any woman who came by, taking in every last detail about her and then dismissing her completely, almost contemptuously.

The taxi shuddering to a halt snapped my thoughts back to the present, and I saw we had stopped outside a low, clay house that stood quite alone. I paid the driver, adding a little baksheesh, got out and stood looking at the house. It was painted white with some tile decorating the upper edge of the roofline, typically Arabian in style with its arched windows and fluted line of roof. Behind the house was a sizable grove of lemon trees, spreading out on both sides.

I tried the front door knob and found it moved; the door swung open. Ahead of me was a living room furnished with a combination of western and Arabian furnishings, low hassocks, modern chairs and camel saddles made into stools. Danvers had, I noted, a taste for decorative wall plaques, but I knew that if the house had any secrets to give up they would not be in the living room.

I moved on down a short hallway, cast a quick glance into a very modern kitchen, then went on to another room which was obviously a bedroom. But, and I frowned, it wasn’t a bedroom used by Fred Danvers. The spreads and drapes were unmistakably feminine in color and styling. Two small dressers stood at opposite sides of the room separated by a large, king-size bed. On the nearest dresser I saw a collection of bottles and jars, cologne, toilet water, facial creams. A hairbrush lay beside the bottles. I picked it up and moved my fingers along the stiff bristles. Two long strands of hair caught onto my index finger as I pressed down into the brush. Carefully I pulled them loose and laid them against my jacket. They were blond hairs. I rolled them into a tiny ball and dropped them into a wastebasket beside the dresser.

I pulled open one of the drawers. Panties, slips, brassieres filled it, and I pushed it closed and thought about the long blond hairs again. Anise Hulden’s hair, I wondered? Walking over to the second dresser, I found an almost identical hairbrush there, atop a small cosmetics box. I ran my fingers along the bristles and this time came up with some short, dark hairs, soft and silky, plainly woman’s hair. Blond hair on one brush; short, dark strands on the other.

A laundry hamper stood in a corner. I opened it, saw more panties, slips and brassieres. One wall of the bedroom was largely taken up by a sliding door. I pushed it open to find a walk-in closet hung with dresses, slack outfits, blouses and filmy negligees. Multiple pairs of women’s sandals and shoes stood on the floor. I picked up one pair, then another and still another. They were different lengths and different widths. I closed the closet door and surveyed the room.

Not one woman had lived here with Danvers but two. Not stayed, not visited, but lived. The clothes, the laundry hamper, the dresses, these weren’t indications of a weekend fling but of steady living. Danvers the family man, with wife and daughters in the States, no involvement with women — according to the record. Most unusual, to say the least.

And where were these women now? Where had they gone, if they’d been living here with Danvers? And why had they gone? The fact that they weren’t here and all their things were indicated they had obviously cleared out in a hurry. But it was all conjecture on my part, except for the evidence of the women’s presence here. There was nothing conjectural about that.

I wondered that nothing like this had ever come out about the man. If Danvers had lived a secret life, he lived it well, kept it completely hidden. Hawk knew his men, knew their habits, their weaknesses, and he’d never even hinted at anything like this about Fred Danvers. Finding a setup like this at my place wouldn’t surprise him in the least. In fact, I found myself grinning, he’d be surprised if he didn’t find it. But Danvers had presented a very different picture all these years. I wondered how much it had to do with what had happened to him. A lot? Everything? Nothing?

I walked from that room into the next one and felt a momentary jolt of excitement. It was a study with one wall of books, an old metal filing cabinet, and an English walnut desk in one corner. A bearskin rug lay across the floor. If there was anything to be uncovered, this room was the likeliest place.

The old desk yielded nothing but some pipes, stationary and some classified AXE papers in code. I yanked open the filing cabinet drawers and started to look through them. Checking the files would, I knew, take hours and I had already resigned myself to the task when I pulled open the bottom drawer. I yanked it out to the very end and was just about to close it when I saw something, the glint of metal. I reached behind the open drawer, pulled out a small metal circular container. I opened it and a roll of film spilled out into my hand. My pulse rate had gone up, intuitively, when I heard the voice:

“I’ll take that,” it said in very clipped, very British and very feminine tones. I turned slowly and saw a smallish girl with a very big Colt .45 in her hand. She had just stepped out of a coat closet in a corner of the room. She held the gun steady, and I moved my eyes from the menacing barrel and took in lime-green slacks, a lemon-yellow blouse pushed out by high, pointed breasts and a pert, snub-nosed face topped by short brown hair. Eyes that I guessed would normally be hazel were now darkened to blackness in intense, angry alertness. Two normally softly sensuous lips delicately curved to deep corners in round, soft cheeks were pulled into a tight, straight line.

“Put the container on the desk and step back,” she ordered grimly. I permitted myself a half-smile. Colt or no Colt, she wasn’t going to risk coming too close.

“What if I say no?” I asked.

“This would go off,” she said, her British accent precise and slipped. “And I should enjoy shooting every bloody one of you.”

I wanted to stall for time, find an opening that I could use without getting my head blasted off. She held the gun very steady, without the hint of a waver.

“Every one of us?” I echoed. “Just who do you think I am, honey?”

“I know who you are and why you want that film,” she said. “You’re one of them. Now, go on, put that container down on the desk. Hurry it up.”

I shrugged and placed the container, the film inside it, on the desk. Studying the girl, I realized that she could well fit into the Tour-Guides girl mold. She was young, damned good-looking, foreign. Only her eyes didn’t go. They were intense, not cool. They revealed, did not hide, things.

“Who are you?” I tried.

“None of your bloody business,” she shot back. “Just say I’m a friend of Fred Danvers.”

I permitted a loud sigh to escape me. “Fred Danvers had a lot of women friends it seems,” I said. “Are you one of those who lived here... in the next room?”

Her eyes narrow, flashing black lightning at me as she moved closer. “Shut your dirty mouth,” she hissed. I watched her gun hand, and it didn’t sway an inch. She was damned attractive in her anger. There was a blazing, righteous quality about her. Her breasts were now thrusting out tightly against the lemon-yellow blouse, her deep, angry breathing pushing them hard against the fabric.

“Get away from the desk,” she said. “Get over in that corner, damn you!” She gestured toward the opposite corner, and suddenly I almost smiled.

“Next thing you’ll be telling me to lie face down on the floor,” I said.

Her eyes went round. “Bloody good idea,” she snapped. “You do just that, old boy, and quick now. Over there, face down.”

“Me and my big mouth,” I grumbled. I went over to the corner, at the edge of the bearskin mg, and lay face down on the floor. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her move quickly to the desk and scoop up the small film container.

“Just stay there and don’t move and you won’t be hurt,” she warned, pointing the gun at me for a last moment and then hurrying across the rug. I could have had Wilhelmina out and blasted her six times by now, but that was the last tiling I wanted to do. I wanted some information, perhaps answers from her, whoever she was.

I watched as she hurried to the door. My hands were spread out, palms down on the floor, just where I’d positioned myself at the edge of the bearskin rug. She was nearly at the door but still on the rug, her back to me, when I grabbed the edges of the soft fur and yanked with all my might. The rug snapped out from under her. Lime-green legs went flipping up into the air as she went over backwards.

She gasped in surprise, and I was up and running before she hit the floor. I dived at her and with a chop to her wrist sent the gun skittering off to one side. I grabbed her arm and started to lift her to her feet when she surprised me with a Judo twist, and I found myself going sideways through the air. But instead of letting go of her arm I took her with me. She screamed in pain as we hit the floor together, a tangle of arms and legs.

“Bloody bastard!” she yelled, and came at me with fingernails aimed at my eyes. I ducked away and threw her backwards with a sharp blow to the shoulder, delivered with the heel of my hand. She aimed a kick at my crotch as I moved after her, and I turned sideways to take it on the thigh. Fighting like a tigress with cubs, she twisted and dived away, but I snapped both hands out and caught her ankles, pulling her back to me.

The lemon-yellow blouse pulled out of her slacks to reveal a creamy-white expanse of waist and back. I whirled her around and slammed her down hard on the floor, hearing her gasp in pain as her head shuck. She tried to bring a hand up, but I had her now. I yanked her arm up and back and twisted her around. This time she really screamed in pain.

“Keep it up and I’ll break it off,” I told her. “I want some answers, and they’d better be the truth. Who are you?” I saw her set her lips tightly and pulled up on her aim. She screamed and thrashed her legs in pain.

“Who are you?” I repeated. “I’m not playing games, honey.” I gave her arm another yank, and she cried out again.

“Judy... Judy Mitchell,” she gasped, blinking through involuntary tears of pain. The name leaped out of my mental file on Fred Danvers.

“You’re Fred Danvers’ secretary?” I said in surprise. She didn’t answer; the tears had been replaced by a hard, hate-filled glance. “So you’re mixed up in this thing with him,” I said.

“I’m not mixed up in anything,” she snapped. The small container with the film lay on the floor only a few feet from us. I gestured toward it with my head. “Then why are you after that?” I asked.

“That’s my business.” She glared up at me. “Why do you want it? Haven’t you done enough with it? He’s dead now. You can’t get anymore out of him.”

The unmistakable sincerity in her voice gave me second thoughts about the girl. I relaxed my grip on her arm. “Look, maybe we’ve both been mistaken,” I ventured. “Maybe we ought to have a nice, quiet talk about this.”

Her eyes glinted. “Jolly good idea that,” she answered. “Suppose you start by not trying to tear my arm off.”

I had just relaxed my grip on her wrist when she came down with her heel on my ankle, a hard, sharp, stabbing pain that made me yelp. Automatically I drew my leg up in pain, and she tore away from me and dived for the gun. I dived after her, brought her down with her fingertips inches from the Colt, clawing the floorboards to reach the weapon. I whirled her around and let her have an open-handed shot that nonetheless made her head swivel. I grabbed a handful of her short brown hair and knocked her head against the floorboards.

“Damn you,” I swore. “You’re a little hell-cat, aren’t you? I’m trying to help you. I’m from AXE. Does that mean anything to you, dammit?”

She lay still for a moment and flashing hazel eyes searched my face. Then she tried to escape with a sudden twist, tried to bring her knee up into my groin. “The hell you are,” she snarled. “You’re one of them, that’s who you bloody well are.”

I slammed her down hard on the floor again, and she cried out. “If you were from AXE you wouldn’t need to come mucking around here,” she half-sobbed. “You’d have the whole bloody story in that letter he wrote you. I put it on the plane myself.”

“They got hold of the letter first,” I said. “When I got it there wasn’t much left I could read.” Her eyes were probing again and suddenly she frowned, trying to decide whether she should believe me or not. Her eyes were really a very soft hazel brown. She was still frowning, still deciding, when I heard a car stopping outside, then a car door being slammed shut.

“We’ve got company,” I whispered, putting a hand over her mouth. I let go of her and hurried to the window, standing to the side and peering out at an angle. I saw four men starting for the front door. They were dressed in the loose, baggy, knicker-like trousers of the serwal and open short vests over bare chests like I’d seen on the bald giant, but he wasn’t among these four. They paused and spoke quietly for a moment, then two of them started to move to the rear of the house. Two and two, I grunted, already thinking defensively.

Judy Mitchel was looking up at me, eyes round and frightened. “Who is it?” she whispered.

“Four men,” I said. “That’s all I know. Now you’ve got a problem. Maybe they’re from AXE, and you were right about me all along. Or maybe I was telling the truth and they’re who you thought I was. Who are you going to go with, honey?”

She was on her feet, eyes flashing again. “I bloody well don’t know why, but I’m going to take you,” she said, never losing her crisp, precise diction. I scooped up the film container and slipped it into my pocket and took the Colt in hand.

“I don’t suppose there’s a cellar to this place?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “They don’t need them out here.”

“Is there a back way to the rear door?” I asked.

“Yes, I’ll show you.” She started off. I yanked her back and put a finger to her lips. “Wait!” I whispered.

I stood at the door of the room with Judy Mitchell, listening as the two came in the front door and then the other two entered by the rear. There was a moment of muffled conversation as they met, probably in the foyer.

“Nothing in the back,” I heard one say. “We start searching.”

“Now!” I said to Judy. “Run. They’ll hear us but we can’t help that.” I had already figured out a plan; it would take more than a little luck and split-second timing, but we’d have the drop on them and it ought to work. At least it would get us outside, which was the important first step. Inside we’d be trapped, and they could get us in a cross fire.

Judy’s round little rear, bounced down the corridor before me and around the corner of a narrow bisecting passageway. I heard shouts of alarm from behind us as our running footsteps echoed through the house. Judy was at the back door, slowing down to open it, when I slammed past her into it and we went flying out together, tumbling into the lemon grove.

Lemon trees seem to be happiest when touching one another, spreading their branches out to interlock and form a thick canopy above the ground. These were no exception. Their greenish-barked trunks rose up straight some ten feet and then the branches jutted out almost at right angles, lying flat to form a green carpet dotted with the yellow citrus fruit.

I handed Judy the Colt. “Get up into the low branches,” I told her. “But don’t shoot till I give you the signal. I’ll take two and you take two.” It was then she tossed my little plan into the ash can.

“It’s not loaded,” she said, her voice small. “I found it in Fred’s desk when I was searching for the film. I took it when I heard you come in.”

“Damn all dumb broads,” I swore. “Get your ass up into the branches anyway. Quick!” I gave her a boost up, then swung myself up into the thick foliage, lying flat along the branches. I’d shoved the Colt in my pocket and brought out Wilhelmina.

The four men had come out of the house already but had halted, peering into the cool semi-darkness of the lemon grove, trying to spot us. I looked among the branches for Judy and I saw her clinging to the next tree. I smiled. Her lemon-yellow blouse and lime-green slacks made a pretty effective camouflage.

I waited, trying to make some adjustment in my original plan that would get us out of this alive, tinning possibilities over in my mind. I was sweating, and I wiped my hands on my shirt. The coolness of the lemon grove was only relative.

I had figured to get off two shots before the four jokers could gather themselves to return fire. That would have taken care of two of them, and Judy would have been taking care of the other two with the Colt. Would have been, I thought grimly. But now my first two shots, no matter how accurate, would reveal my position and they’d have me pinpointed, unable to move. If their first shots at me went wild, I might get off another one that could take care of one more. But the fourth one would have me for sure. Once my initial advantage of surprise was gone, they’d have all the odds on their side. What I needed was a double-dose of surprise.

My mind raced as I heard them start to cautiously advance. Maybe there was a chance, a damned slim chance. I saw them appear below, spread out but walking four abreast, guns in hand, moving cautiously, pausing with each step.

Raising my arm slowly, I drew a bead on the nearest two, waited when they disappeared for a moment behind some foliage and then, as they came into view again, fired. I swung the Luger in a short, straight line from the first to the second man, getting both of them before they could even look up. But, as I knew they would, the other two had me positioned immediately. Their first shots tore through the leaves near my head.

I let out a yell and dropped from the branch, pushing myself off in a half-roll calculated to land me face-down on the ground. Arms and shoulders tensed, braced, I hit and felt every bone in my body shudder. I lay there, Wilhelmina still clutched in one outstretched hand, a silent, inert form, and heard the two men running up. It was then that Judy tossed me an assist, without meaning to. She let out a short cry of dismay, and the two men halted at my feet to look up into the trees for her. It was an added, badly-needed second and I made full use of it.

Pushing up and rolling over, I hit them both ankle-high with my body and got off a shot at the same time. One man’s face exploded in a cascade of red. The other assailant, thrown off balance, fired a shot that went into and through the soft flesh of my shoulder. I felt the sharp pain of tearing flesh and the warm spurt of blood. But he never got another shot off, as Wilhelmina barked again and he catapulted backwards, landing in a lifeless heap.

I got to my feet and looked up into the trees. “Well, you going to stay up there all day?” I yelled at Judy. She came, half-sliding, half-falling out of the branches, landed and looked at me wide-eyed.

“I thought you’d been killed!” she confessed.

“So did they.” I grinned at her. “Where to now?” But her eyes saw the red stain under my jacket and grew into big round saucers. “You’ve been hit!” she gasped.

“And it hurts like hell,” I said. “Most flesh wounds do.”

“Come on, we’ll go to my place,” she said. “I parked my bug about fifty yards away and walked over.” She took my arm to support me, and I grinned down at her.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I’m not done in yet. You just walk as fast as your little legs can carry you.” She tossed me an indignant look and strode off, her breasts bouncing merrily. There was something terribly appealing about her gutsy, perky manner, but I realized I knew almost nothing about how she fitted into this thing, except that she was Fred Danvers’ secretary.

In her car, a light-blue Volkswagen, we rode in silence, taking backroad, sandy lanes into the city. Her apartment was in the newer section of Jidda, overlooking Airport Road. It was sunny and comfortably furnished with a low, wide settee and plenty of thick pillows and small Arabian carpets, scattered about a large living room. I glimpsed a bedroom and kitchen beyond. Judy went into the bathroom, reappeared with bandages, cotton pads and antiseptic dressing. Using scissors, she cut off the sleeve of my shirt, after I slipped off the jacket. I pulled the rest of the shirt free and watched as she bathed the wound. The slung had gone in and out without tearing apart anything important, and the wound was more painful than serious. Judy did a good job of bandaging. “Nurse’s aide in Lanchashire,” she said, noticing my admiring look.

As she stepped back to view her handiwork, her glance lingered on my powerful chest.

“You’re Nick Carter, all right,” she announced. “Fred told me about some of the things you’ve done. Only a man with a build like that could have done them.”

I could have said something about hers, speaking of builds, but I tabled it. While she bandaged my shoulder, her breasts had kept brushing softly against my chest and arm.

I got up and started to help her clean away the mess. She’d hung my jacket over a chair across the room, and I walked over to it and fished into the pocket for the film container. It wasn’t there and I straightened up, anger creeping over me. Casually, I moved across the room as Judy came out of the kitchen. I grabbed her and flung her down on the settee.

“Let’s have it,” I said angrily. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, doll, but I’d quit if I were you.”

“You’re hurting me,” she protested. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The film,” I growled. “Where is it?”

“You... you must have lost it during the fight in the lemon grove,” she suggested.

I shook my head. “Good try but it won’t work,” I said. “I checked my pocket before we left Danvers’ place, and it was there.” I reached for the top of her blouse and pulled down. The top two buttons came undone. “The film,” I said. “What’d you do with it?”

“What are you doing?” she said, alarm creeping into her voice as she glanced down at her blouse. I pulled again and two more buttons came open, revealing the creamy top of her breasts in a white brassiere.

“The whole thing’s coming off, honey, for starters,” I growled. “Now either you play ball, or I’ll treat you like any other lying little whore.”

“Why must you look at the film?” she asked, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “It won’t make any difference. It won’t tell you who’s behind it. It won’t really answer anything you want to know.”

I yanked the rest of the blouse open and now her brassiere was exposed.

“The film,” I growled. “I haven’t figured you out in this, yet, but I’m not playing games. The film, damn your shifty little hide.”

She nodded, tears sliding down her cheeks now, toward a small end table in a corner of the room. “In the drawer,” she sniffled.

I let go of her, stomped over to the table and yanked open the drawer. The container was there, and I opened it and took out the film. I walked over to a lamp and snapped the fight on, casting a glance at Judy Mitchell. She was sitting with head averted, cheeks stained with her silent tears. I held the film up to the fight and began to am the frames slowly through my fingers.

It would have taken first prize at any stag film showing.

The frames were spliced together shots. Fred Danvers and one girl, a blonde, indulging in trick positions. Then Danvers with a brunette, same routine with variations. Then Danvers being ministered to by both girls, enjoying sex a la troika. I shot another glance at Judy. She hadn’t looked up. The last set of frames showed Danvers flagellating the blonde, then using the end of the whip as a substitute phallus on her. Real far-out, real sick.

I silently coiled the film up, put it back in the container and went over to Judy Mitchell. Putting one finger under her chin, I turned her face to look into her eyes. They were still swimming with tears and, suddenly, she was burying her face in my bare chest and sobbing deep, anguished sobs.

“I didn’t want anyone to see them,” she sobbed. “Not you, not AXE, nobody.”

“Were these the girls whose clothes I found in that bedroom?” I asked. “They were living there with him?”

Between sobs, she nodded and managed to get out a few words. “Those and others that came,” she said. Finally, she drew away and wiped her eyes. The picture was becoming a little clearer, and parts of it were showing nastier and uglier.

“Danvers was being blackmailed,” I ventured, and Judy Mitchell shrugged.

“I suspect so. I never knew for sure,” she said.

Willard Egmont flashed into my mind. Was he being blackmailed too? Was that why he took his own life so inexplicably two years ago. And was there a connection between Egmont’s case and Danvers’, or were they two similar but totally unrelated occurences? All good questions. All damned vital questions. But I was running ahead of myself. All I knew for sure was that Fred Danvers had some very compromising film in his possession.

“Tell me everything you know, Judy,” I said, sitting down beside her. “Every last little thing I you can think of.”

“There’s not much,” she said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eyes. “I knew he had those girls living with him. There’s not much a man can keep secret from his secretary, especially if she works as closely with him as I did with Fred. I knew he was caught up in something, but I never pried, never questioned. I knew it was a deep, dark part of him that he was ashamed of, even afraid of, and I couldn’t hint him by questioning him. When he learned you were coming out to see him, he seemed to just fall apart.”

That figured, I told myself. Danvers no doubt guessed the reason for my visit.

“You put the letter on the plane, you said. Did you know what was in it?” I asked her.

“No, it was sealed and just given to me to mail,” she replied. I watched her eyes grow misty at the recollection. “I remember what he said. ‘I’m going to cheat them, Judy. This letter will do it for me. They’ll never let me live, but they’re not going to have the pleasure of killing me, either. Don’t remember the bad things you’ll hear. Just remember the good times we’ve had working together. This letter will explain it all. Put it on the plane for personal delivery to Ted Wilson at the airport. Who knows, when I tell them I’ve put it all in the letter, they might just panic and run and let me live. I don’t know if that’d be much better, though. I couldn’t face the world now, Judy. Not anymore.’ ”

Her voice trailed off. My mind was fitting things together, seeing where Danvers had made his mistake. If he hadn’t told them he’d put everything in the letter to me, they’d never have known until it was too late. But he’d given them a last chance and they seized it, of course, first by trying to get rid of me altogether, then by getting to the letter ahead of me. But there were still a lot of blank spaces to fill.

“You didn’t know I hadn’t gotten the letter,” I said. “Why were you in Danvers’ house then?”

“I wanted to destroy the film,” she said. “I’d seen it once, by accident. I was going through some books in the wall case and it fell out from behind them. I grew so sick when I looked at it, I almost threw up. But I didn’t want you or anyone else to see it.”

“So what have I got?” I asked myself aloud. “His letter named names, places, motives I’m sure. But all I know is that he was being blackmailed because of some stag film. And even that doesn’t hold up. If he had the film, how could they use it against him?”

“It was a copy,” Judy said. “They had the original. That much he told me. Poor Fred, poor, poor Fred. He must have had a terrible, dark sickness that was eating at him. He might even have managed it, if they’d only left him alone.”

“Who the hell are they?” I shot out. “You keep talking about they?”

She shrugged, helplessly. “Whoever kept sending him the girls,” she said. “These weren’t the only ones I told you. There were others, and others before them. Oh, God, poor Fred.” She sprang up and went into the bathroom and I heard the sound of water running. After awhile, she came back, her tears dried, her face white below the red rims of her eyes. But she still had the prettiest little nose and the softest hazel eyes, filled with anguish.

As I watched her, I knew that she could help me in this thing. Vague, floating thoughts in the back of my mind hadn’t taken shape yet but already they told me, subconsciously, that I’d need a girl to move in against this shadowy evil, someone to front for me. But I had to find out how deep her feelings really went. I gazed at her round, sad, hurt eyes and took a chance.

“You were in love with Fred Danvers,” I said.

She looked steadily back at me.

“Not the way you mean it,” she said.

“How do I mean it?” I asked, sneeringly.

“You mean it like some office romance, the boss and the little secretary,” she said, her voice edged with anger. “Now that you’ve seen that film you probably think he was a dirty old man. Well, he wasn’t. It wasn’t that way between us at all.”

“How was it?” I said, keeping the same sneering intonation.

“Fred Danvers gave me a job when I was emotionally at rock bottom,” she said angrily. “My fiancé was killed in an air crash while Fred was visiting in England. He offered me a chance to get away, to forget. As I came to know him, I found he was very much like Rob — my dead fiancé. Patient, tender, understanding, he even looked like an older version of Rob.”

“So you fell in love with him,” I said coldly.

“Dammit, you keep making it sound like some shoddy little affair,” she said, now thoroughly mad. “He never touched me. It was something I kept inside myself. I doubt he ever knew how I felt for him. I understood him, and it was its own kind of hell, knowing and standing by.”

“Knowing what? That he was living-it-up with these girls?”

“You’re disgusting,” she said, leaping to her feet. “Knowing that it was tearing the man to pieces, doing terrible things to him. Whenever they’d put pressure on him, I knew it by the harried, haggard look of him, by the sleepless nights he told me about. It was breaking him apart!”

“Not so much that he quit and told us about it,” I said unfeelingly. And maybe I wasn’t completely acting either. I didn’t exactly share Judy’s feminine sympathy.

“You bastard!” she screamed at me. “Is that all you can think?”

“No, I can think farther,” I said. “I can think that he cared more about odd-ball sex than his country.”

She came flying at me then, fists flailing, sobbing and screaming. “He was sick, can’t you understand that? Sick, sick!” She was pounding on my chest. “You don’t want to understand. You just want to pass judgment, damn you!”

I put a hand against her chest, shoved her down on the settee and held her there. It was hard because she broke into another spell of sobbing. But she’d answered my question. Her involvement was deep, real deep, and I could feel more sorry for her than for Danvers. We were made differently, this spunky little girl and I. Like most women would be, she was all wrapped up in the emotional, understanding side of it. Sure, maybe Fred Danvers was sick. But even sick people can exercise free choice. But I didn’t say that, not to Judy. She would help me, I knew, in anything she could to avenge Fred Danvers. That was all I wanted at the moment.

“You’re a good girl, Judy,” I said quietly, and she looked up at me, bewildered. “You want to help me strike back for Fred Danvers?”

She sat up, eyes intense, serious. “Oh, God, do I! Just show me how and when.”

“I’ll show you,” I promised. “It’s a deal.” She was looking at me, wide-eyed, and suddenly her face was against my bare chest again. Her arms went my waist and she clung to me.

“Oh, God,” she murmured. “You make me feel so ruddy safe. You’re like a tree.”

I grinned down a her and stroked her soft, brown hair. “Go ahead,” I said. “Feel safe.”

It was a feeling I suspected she hadn’t experienced in a long time. I wished it were true now. But what the hell, so long as she felt it, it was true.

Chapter 5

The warm hazel eyes, the touch of her hand, the quick temper that changed to instant tears, all reflected the long-suppressed desires inside her that sought a chance to burst free, like the full breasts I’d glimpsed in their white protective cups.

Yet she was, for the most part, still an unknown, just a quick-tempered, gutsy female. Judy Mitchell was still hidden from me, from the world and from herself, the woman inside her obscured. Maybe she wouldn’t be, by the time this was over.

“I’m glad you want to pay them back for Fred too,” she said. “I was afraid that once you found Fred was dead, you’d be finished with the whole thing.”

I shook my head. “Not on your life, honey,” I said. “I don’t do things that way.”

I didn’t tell her that avenging Fred Danvers was not the major motivation for me. She was happy thinking that it was, so I left it that way. From what I knew of his business so far, Fred Danvers’ suicide had to be only a small part of something much bigger. To Judy, it was everything. Me, I smelled a lot more than simple blackmail.

Supplying someone with women while blackmailing him at the same time was a new twist in itself, and I’d bet Danvers was not an isolated case. The way I’d been carefully set up for murder, the way they used women in their operation, the thoroughness with which they attempted to cross every T and dot every I, spoke of something far beyond scummy little blackmailers.

I recalled Hawk’s remarks about Danvers’ Saudi Arabia station being a virtual clearinghouse for information about intrigue in southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Maybe Danvers hadn’t been the only clearinghouse.

One thing was certain: something big was lurking under my nose, and so far I had only sniffed the edges. To get inside, get at the answers right now I had two trump cards to play. One, the fact that they didn’t know whether I’d read the letter or not; and two, Judy Mitchell. They had used Anise Hulden on me. I’d use Judy Mitchell on them.

Judy started clattering pots and pans to start dinner, and I decided to go back to the hotel for another shirt. The one I’d taken off was out of service forever.

“Don’t answer the door unless you’re sure it’s me,” I told Judy. If they knew as much as they did about Danvers, they also knew about her and they might wonder how much she knew about them.

“Ring the buzzer and I’ll look out the window,” she said.

I slipped out the door, hurried to the hotel and — on second thought — collected all my things. When I returned with bag and baggage, I had to grin at the frown on Judy’s face. I also smiled at something else. She had changed from the lime-green slacks into a hostess gown slit from mid-thigh down, revealing long, beautiful legs, slim ankles and softly curved thighs when she walked.

“I thought you just went to get a fresh shirt,” she said, eyeing me warily.

“Two can live as cheaply as one,” I said cheerily.

“Anything else?” she asked coolly surveying me.

“It’s nicer here than in my hotel room,” I said.

“What else?”

“Protection.” I grinned at her. “Look upon me as your watchdog.”

“Anything else?” she repeated.

“Of course not,” I said, my tone reflecting injured innocence. “I hope you don’t think I’m the kind that would assume things.”

“I bloody well do think so,” she snapped. “You probably didn’t believe a word of what I said about Fred Danvers and me.”

“Sure I did,” I protested honestly. “But I’m not Fred Danvers. I’m very different.”

She studied me a long moment. “Yes, you’re different, all right,” she said finally. Then suddenly she smiled. “Fix us a drink while I finish getting dinner,” she said, and I realized it was the first time she’d smiled since we met. Her snub-nose wrinkled and her eyes danced, and she was part elf, part women and altogether bewitching. I eyed the long, lovely line of leg, exposed by the slit hostess gown as she walked into the kitchen.

In a small cabinet Judy had good English gin and dry vermouth, and I made martinis, very cold and very dry. She came out and curled up beside me on the settee. We sipped our drinks and tried to talk of little, unimportant things, but it didn’t work. What had happened was too much with us to ignore.

“This Ibn Hassouk,” I said, “did Fred know him personally?”

Her answer surprised me, somehow I’d expected it to be in the negative. Instead, she said, “Yes, he did, Nick. Hassouk often had him to parties at his estate. It’s just south of here, only about ten miles from Jidda.”

I turned that one over in my mind. I still carried the sour taste of my visit to Tour-Guide Trips, and I asked Judy what she knew about the outfit.

“They conduct all kinds of package tours here in Jidda and throughout Saudi Arabia,” she said, finishing her martini. “They’re a legitimate outfit... why the smile?”

“Every good front operates legitimately,” I said.

“But they advertise for their girls in newspapers all over the world,” Judy argued. “Getting accepted by them is harder than becoming an airline hostess. A friend of mine once applied and was turned down. She was about to be married, and they want only single girls with no ties and no obligations of any sort.”

“And no one to inquire after them,” I mused aloud.

“What’s that?” Judy asked.

“Nothing, just thinking out loud,” I replied. “I want you to apply there for a job. That will be step number one in our campaign.”

“How does that tie up with helping Fred?” She frowned.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said honestly. “But it might tie up very much. I just don’t know at this point. I’m told Ibn Hassouk personally interviews all applicants. If so, you get an interview with him set up, and I’ll tell you what we do then.”

She got up, again flashing a length of lovely cream-white leg. “Dinner should be ready,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

I was somewhat famished myself, and we ate quickly, simply, on lamb and saffron-spiced rice. Judy had taken to Arab cuisine. During dinner I briefed her on what I wanted her to say when she applied for the Tour-Guide job. When we finished, it was dark.

Judy lay back on the settee beside me, letting go finally after the tension and excitement of the day. Her breasts rose and fell rhythmically under the gathered bodice of the hostess gown; her legs were extended half-revealed, half-concealed. She seemed totally unaware of how enticing she was. But I sure as hell was aware of it.

“I think you’d better go to bed, doll,” I said, shaking her by the shoulder. “I’ll bed down here on the settee. It’ll do fine. It’s plenty wide and long enough.”

She stood, walked over to the bedroom door and paused. “Do I have to lock the door?” she asked quietly.

“Why?” I grinned at her. “If I wanted in, I’d break it down anyway.”

“At least you’re honest about it,” she said. “Good night, Nick.”

“Good night,” I said, and watched her disappear into the other room. She’d hesitated in the doorway, as though she wanted to say something more but changed her mind. I undressed in the dark, down to my shorts, and lay down on the settee. The night was, as usual in Jidda, hot as Hell, but Judy had a series of small fans that seemed to sweep the breeze from one place to another, and they helped a lot. I finally went to sleep.

I don’t know how long I was asleep when I felt my skin tingling, waking me, warning me. But I’d trained myself never to react with a sudden motion that might trigger whatever was there, not until I got my bearings. And so I lay still and just barely opened my eyes, knowing only that I was not alone in the room. Through slitted eyes, I saw a white form next to me that slowly took shape as a towel wrapped around a body.

She was just standing there, looking down at me, intently. As I watched, she reached out to touch my chest. But, with her fingertips only a fraction away from me, she drew back. Finally, she lowered her hand, turned on tiptoe and moved away. I heard the soft sound of the bedroom door as it closed.

Judy had come in to drink of my body, to partake without partaking, to stand at the edge of the sea and not go in. More than a lovely girl had stood beside me in the dark just now. A lovely creature of desire and hope, of fear and uncertainty had stood there. I wondered what would have happened if I had opened my eyes and sat up. I went back to sleep, toying with the possibilities.

In the morning I awoke before she did, dressed and shaved and hurried out to visit the marketplaces before Judy went to apply at Tour-Guide Trips. With the efficiency I’d noted about this shadowy operation, the chances were that they knew Judy Mitchell, Fred Danvers’ secretary. When I finished with her, they wouldn’t.

She was waiting and wondering when I returned and tossed an assortment of bags and boxes on the settee. With a flourish, I brought out a blonde wig, real hair, of course, a set of false eyelashes and a half-dozen jars of theatrical make-up.

“Meet Jill Manion.” I announced. “Take off that lovely blue dress. We’ve work to do.”

Obediently, she went into the bedroom, came back in a half-slip with a towel draped around her shoulders demurely covering her bra. I’ve had more than enough experience with the disguise bit. With what I’ve learned from Special Effects when they’ve worked on me from time to time, I could almost quality as a make-up man in Hollywood.

Of course, with a girl, hair was the major item, changing appearance with one broad stroke. I applied a tan facial cream to her skin, deepening the tones and then added the somewhat garish false eyelashes. Then the wig, carefully put on and secured in place. When I’d finished, Judy with her sweet, pert naturalness had vanished. In her place was a brassy, unsubtle girl seeking adventure and excitement.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said, as Judy reappeared from the bedroom in a blue dress with a low-cut neckline revealing her full creamy-white breasts.

“Have you got everything straight?” I added, and she nodded. “Run over it again,” I ordered.

“The name is Jill Manion, as of this morning, anyway.” She laughed excitedly. “And Jill is single, unattached, no romantic involvements. Both her parents are dead. She comes from just outside London and is an only child with no close relatives.”

“You’ve got it,” I said. She brushed my cheek with a fast kiss “for luck” and was gone.

I went to the window and watched her hurrying off. Step one of my plan was in motion. I knew that if Judy got past the application hurdle, step two was almost certain to be a success. And once she was scheduled for an interview with Hassouk, I would use her more boldly.

I sat down and tried to read, but my mind kept leaping back to Judy, wondering how she was doing. The minutes dragged into each other and grew seemingly longer and longer. This kind of waiting I hated, and I paced up and down with frequent pauses at the window to look out. Finally I saw the flash of blue hurrying down the street, the long, lovely legs striding quickly in the morning sun.

Judy burst into the apartment all smiles, radiant and even the phony get-up couldn’t subdue the natural effervescense of her personality. She threw her arms around me and whisked off the wig, all in one motion.

“It worked, Nick!” she exclaimed excitedly. “It worked. They took my application, made a phone call, and Ibn Hassouk wants to interview me this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?” I frowned at that.

“Why, what’s wrong with this afternoon?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Nothing really, I guess. I wanted to go by Hassouk’s place myself, before you went there, that’s all, but that’s out now. There isn’t time. Do you know what the place is like at all?”

“Only the few things Fred told me and what I’ve been able to see passing by,” she answered. “It’s at the edge of the desert and tall hedges of rhododendron and eucalyptus surround the buildings. He’s had everything imported or specially built for him — irrigation canals, olive and date trees, the works. The main building is the first one. That’s connected to a second building by an outdoor passageway, I’m told. Then there’s a third building, and the stables and garages.”

I swore inwardly. I hadn’t wanted to toss Judy into the lion’s den without some protection, but it looked as if that’s the way it would have to be. I’d do my best and play it by ear.

“What do I do after I get there?” she asked. “Take the job?”

“When you and Hassouk are alone, you tell him that you don’t really want a job,” I said. “Tell him that a Mr. Ted Wilson sent you. He knows that name, if he knows anything about this. If he’s involved, hell react and set up a meeting for me. If he passes it off, well, that might mean that he, personally, doesn’t know what’s going on. It could mean that his personnel at Tour-Guide Trips are playing a game of their own. Actually, Judy, you’re on a fishing expedition.”

“Good!” She glanced at her watch. “Time for a fast bite, and then I’ll drive down to the palatial estate of one Ibn Hassouk.” She smiled up at me. “Just meeting him will be exciting. He’s such a man of mystery, really.”

“I’m going out,” I said. “I’ll see you back here after the interview. Good luck, honey. And don’t be frightened.”

Looking at her shining, eager face, I knew that last bit was unnecessary. She didn’t really understand what we might be playing with, and perhaps it was better that way.

Downstairs, I hailed a taxi and ordered him to drive me to the home of Ibn Hassouk. The driver gave me a quick, raised-eyebrow glance. Most people going there apparently went in limousines.

I wanted to get to Hassouk’s before Judy. I was using her, the way they’d used Anise Hulden, but my conscience was such that I had to give her as much protection as I could. Chances were that if Hassouk was mixed up in this, he wouldn’t be so crude as to move directly against Judy, in his own place, knowing I’d sent her there. But I couldn’t be certain. I had wanted to be inside while she was there, and I had thought this interview wouldn’t be set for at least a day, giving me time to plan a way to get in. But now things were moving fast, and I had to try to move with them.

It wasn’t long before I saw the tall outlines of the palatial buildings rising up from the desert. I ordered the cabbie to stop about half a mile away and got out. The heat was an outdoor barbecue, and I was the chicken. A cluster of white-garbed pilgrims came along, using their walking sticks, and I tagged along with them until I drew nearer to the estate.

The tall hedges Judy had described surrounded the place and I saw robed guards at the entrance gate, black pistol belts at their waists. A denuded, lone olive tree hugged the edge of the road some two hundred yards from the gate, and I left the pilgrims to flatten myself against the somewhat narrow trunk. From there I could see the main buildings, the entrance and up and down the road which went past it.

Traffic on the road was quite heavy. Buses packed with pilgrims, tourist vehicles, motorcycles, private cars, donkeys and camel trains, women carrying jugs of water, itinerant merchants and the ever-present aimless wanderers moved along the sandy road.

I quickly found myself able to distinguish those who were bound for Ibn Hassouk’s estate. They were mostly tradesmen making deliveries; there were service vehicles and a camel train, the beasts laden with boxes, carpets and sacks of wheat and millet. Judy would be arriving soon, and if I were going to make a move, this was the time. In the heat-smudged distance, I saw a small panel truck approaching. I moved away from the tree and flagged it down. A robed Arab stuck his head out of the walk-in cab, and I cast a quick glance at the word on the side panels: “Laundry” it proclaimed, in Arabic.

“You are going to the house of Ibn Hassouk?” I asked. He nodded, and I clipped him precisely on the point of the jaw with a short right that traveled only inches. “May you sleep well, my friend,” I murmured, as I caught him in my arms and dragged him into the back of the truck.

His was apparently a two-way operation because there were big sacks of dirty laundry on one side of the truck and bundles of clean sheets on the other. Changing clothes with him was simple enough. I merely put his voluminous robes and kijaffe over my own things. I bound and gagged him using one of the clean sheets; it was the least I could do. Then I took an empty sack and stuffed him into it, taking care that he would be able to breathe.

I was starting the little truck when I saw Judy’s blue Volkswagen go by. I drove slowly, giving her time to stop at the gate, be checked out by the guards and then drive into the grounds. I steered the truck for the gate, wondering what the routine would be when I reached it.

The guards waved at me, and I waved a robed arm back at them and drove through. The laundry truck was obviously a regular visitor to the place. I saw Judy’s blue bug parked by the driveway in front of the main house, an imposing building of pink marble front and clay sides decorated with tiles. I drove alongside the building, moving slowly, and saw the passageway, roofed and latticed with flowers, connecting the first building with a square equally imposing, building.

I pulled up just outside the second building where the passageway ended in an arched doorway. Reaching into the truck, I found a large bundle of tied bedsheets marked “Hassouk.” I hoisted them on my shoulder and stepped from the truck.

The hot sun baked the grass-covered courtyard, and I idly wondered how much the water bill was to keep the grass as green as it was. The bundle of clean sheets on my shoulder, I walked into the building. I had no objection to looking around, but that wasn’t my main purpose. I wanted to find some niche to hide in until I saw Judy leave. And, if she didn’t leave, to stay hidden until nightfall.

I heard voices when I entered the building, women’s voices, laughing and singing. The smell of jasmine and roses hit me, the same heady scent Anise Hulden had worn. Keeping the laundry with me, I padded across a mosaic floor, following the sound of the voices into a short, arched corridor.

Turning a corner, I pulled up short at the edge of a huge indoor bath. Ornate fountains of bronze fish spurted water gently into the air. Marble lined the four sides and stone steps led from one side down into the water. But the creatures inside the bath were anything but stone and marble. They were flesh-and-blood girls, fair ones and dark ones, relaxing, swimming, playing in the fountain-sprayed water, naked water nymphs, their lithe figures magnificent.

It was a scene out of ancient history, the girls of the harem at their bath, only it was happening right in front of me. It was complete, down to the four immobile figures standing against each of the walls, wearing the costume of serwal trousers and the loose, open vests over bare chests I’d seen before. Each of them had a gold-handled dagger in his waist, and I suddenly recognized them for what they were: the eunuchs guarding the harem, Ibn Hassouk’s harem.

I made a fast count of the girls and came up with twenty. Their variety puzzled me. I saw milk-white blondes, plainly from the Scandinavian lands, darker Mediterranean types, Chinese and African girls. Hassouk certainly went in for variety. As I stood in the shadows, transfixed by the beauty of the scene, two girls swam lazily by the near edge of the bath. I saw in their eyes that strange cool, distant expression that I’d noticed in Anise Hulden’s, and in the eyes of the other Tour-Guide girls. I searched some of the other girls’ faces. The look was there. Odd. My musings were brought to a sudden end by a shout behind me. Turning, I saw the towering figure, the bald head and the beautifully muscled body of the brown giant. In his hands he carried a whip, and his eyes were dark with anger.

“Hah!” he shouted again, and one huge hand grabbed me, jerked me forward and threw me to the ground. The laundry bundle broke open and sheets spilled all over. I heard the crack of the whip, then felt its sharp, cutting sting, and I was grateful for my stolen Arab robes for more than one reason.

“Damnable son of a flea-bitten camel,” the giant shouted. “You know it is forbidden to come to this part of the house.” I felt the sharp cut of the whip again and lay face down on the floor, calling on my best Arabic.

“I am new, mighty one,” I whimpered. “The regular man is ill. I did not know.”

He kicked me in the ribs, and I tried to curl up into a ball. He kicked me in the backside, and the force of it sent me rolling over to crash against the wall. I lay there, face averted, wondering how many ribs were broken.

“Lying spawn of a desert jackel!” he bellowed, and the whip whistled into me again.

“I speak the truth,” I cried in pain, as the whip cut into me again. I didn’t have to fake the pain.

He reached down, grabbed me by the back of the neck, lifted me up and sent me sprawling twenty feet with a tremendous throw. I remembered how he had collapsed that morning from my half-strength blow. He was a pretty good actor. The muscles were for real, and if I needed any further convincing, I was getting it. What was it his pal White Suit had called him? Tomas. Okay, Tomas, I thought grimly. Just stick around. We’ve got unfinished business coming up.

“In there,” he was shouting, pointing the whip toward a small corridor going in the other direction. “Take your sheets in there and then leave. Come this way again and I shall take your skin off inch by inch.”

“May Allah heap his praises on you,” I murmured and started to crawl toward the door. I saw him turn and stride away, fight on the balls of his feet, moving like a jungle cat.

It was clear now that Tomas was one of Hassouk’s eunuchs, undoubtedly head eunuch. But that didn’t necessarily implicate Hassouk. Tomas and some of his friends could have something going for themselves, but I couldn’t really buy that. Harem eunuchs are known for their loyalty to their masters, strangely enough. Perhaps they feel they need the protection of those who castrated them. Maybe an obedience fetish replaces their lost manhood. Modern psychiatry no doubt has explanations galore for the phenomenon. All I know is that palace eunuchs have a history of slavish loyalty, so it was unlikely that Tomas would be doing his own thing under his master’s nose.

I carted the clean sheets into the area Tomas had designated and found sacks of dirty laundry ready to be taken away. With each trip to the truck and back, I moved out onto the grass to check the Volkswagen. It was still there, and I kept lugging sacks back and forth, just to appear busy.

Finally, I saw Judy leaving. I threw the sack on my shoulder into the truck and tooled out of the grounds after her. A glance back showed the big bald eunuch walking along the passageway connecting the two main buildings. But I was passing through the gate, feeling as though I’d left a strange, other world; a place that ran by its own rules and was subject to no outside laws, a piece of ancient times come to life, an oasis of yesterday in today’s world.

But as I drove along the sandy road, I realized that that was a pretty damned good description of all of Saudi Arabia. What I’d seen wasn’t at all incongruous in this strange land. The vast harems of ancient Arab rulers had been largely made up of slave girls either purchased, stolen or captured in wars. Ibn Hassouk’s harem was only an echo of past glories. But how much of an echo, I wondered?

I knew that slaves were still marketed throughout the Arab lands. The British had tried to stamp out the traffic. So had the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese. They’d never really succeeded, and with the new, independent states proliferating, the old ways had burst forth with renewed vigor in many areas. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. This thing grew “curiouser and curiouser” every minute.

Back in the city, I pulled over and untied the sack I’d put the driver in. I removed his gag. “Don’t make a sound, or I’ll wrap you in pig’s hide,” I warned him. His eyes, round with fright, told me he’d stay quiet long enough for me to get safely away. Then he’d start to holler and someone would free him.

When I reached the apartment, Judy was there waiting, glowing with excitement.

“It worked, Nick,” she said, impulsively hugging me. “I met Hassouk and said just what you told me to say. He invited us both to a dinner party tomorrow night.”

“That’s all?” I queried. “He just invited us to this party?”

“That’s all,” Judy said. “He did smile in a funny sort of way and nod his head when I sprang it on him. He’s so huge, Nick, so gross.” She halted and a frown appeared. “I still don’t know what this has to do with striking back for Fred,” she said. “You don’t think Ibn Hassouk is connected with the blackmailers, do you?”

I shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m looking forward to our meeting.” That was certainly no he.

So far things had gone well. The fish had nibbled the bait, and that alone said plenty to me. The next move would be mine and I had it ready. Judy had played her part well. I had to play mine equally well tomorrow night. I didn’t know how well Ibn Hassouk would help me play it, and how dirty a part it would be.

“You deserve to be taken out to dinner,” I said, and Judy was quick to agree. We changed, she into a low-necked green gown that made her young breasts stand out beautifully, and went out on the town. I made certain to stay away from those spots where Anise Hulden and I had been, to avoid sour memories as much as anything else.

But Judy was happy, a girl who hadn’t been out in a long time. She bubbled, glowed, chattered, then suddenly grew soft and dreamy and warm. Her skin had a soft, silken feel to it and her hazel eyes could change expression from eager little girl to warm sensuousness with startling suddenness.

When I took her home, she was all soft kitten, clinging to me with a strangely innocent seductiveness. We had a nightcap and she sat beside me, wanting in so many different ways, wanting to be bold, yet afraid to be wanting.

I patted the wide settee. “Why not stay here tonight?” I said. She didn’t answer, keeping her face averted.

“It’ll save tip-toeing in later,” I said. She raised her head then and embarrassment flooded over her. I cut it off by pulling her head down against my chest, felt her arms go around me.

“I don’t know why it’s so different with you than it was with Fred,” she said, her voice small. Her breasts, soft mounds pressed into me. “You exude something, a sexuality that reaches out.”

“Maybe you’re just easily captivated,” I suggested.

“Meaning what, exactly?” she said.

“Like being all bottled up,” I said.

“And you’re good at opening bottles, I’ll bet,” she said, lifting her lips up to mine. I kissed her, and she was sweet wine, soft and wanting with a virginal tenderness. Then she pulled away and her temper flared.

“I don’t need charity,” she shot at me.

“Do I seem the charity-dispensing type?” I asked, and watched her hazel eyes grow softly dark.

“No, thank God for that,” she answered.

“Then shut up” I said, pressing my mouth hungrily against hers. I parted her lips, sweet and soft, with my tongue and let it find the inside of her mouth, soft, wet, so reminiscent of other things. I probed and darted and felt her body twist in my arms, and then the dam broke in a rush of pent-up desire.

Judy answered my kiss and her hand flew to the tiny zipper at the neck of her dress, and my hand found one of the soft, white breasts, so much rounder and fuller even than they appeared. At my touch, she cried out in painful pleasure, the agonized ecstasy of beautiful desire long held back. We found the settee plenty wide enough for both of us, and as I explored her body, Judy made soft, cooing noises, and with the movements of her legs, beckoned my exploring hand.

I closed my palm around the soft, moist, center of her very being. She whimpered and pushed hard against me, asking, begging, wanting again, but this time with the unvarnished, undeniable wanting of the senses. Judy’s breasts, the small nipples barely peeking above the white mounds of loveliness, typified the girl, virginal, yet worldly, a child and a woman. Her eager, hungry yearning brought out a gentleness in me. Her excited response at the mere touch of my tongue on her small pale-pink nipples mirrored the unaffected innocence of her senses.

This wonderfully captivating combination in one round, curvy body made love with an unfettered abandon, each new sensation a thing of wild gasps and moans. We grew more intense together, and her breathing became shallower, her breasts rising and falling in rhythmic cadence under my hand and then, with the suddenness expected yet always unexpected, she cried out and time stood still, the world exploded, the meaning of it all throbbed and pulsed, a silent cry of triumph.

Judy lay tight against me, her arms wrapped around my body, legs holding me pinned, unwilling to move away. She moaned quietly, small sounds of remembered ecstasy.

“I must be shameless or something,” she finally whispered. “I don t feel sorry or guilty or anything at all like that. Maybe it’s your influence.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But never feel sorry or guilty for anything so beautiful. Just be sorry you waited so long.”

“Waiting for you was worth it, I think,” she said, thoughtful, serious, and then suddenly her voice turned quicksilver. “But I want to make up for lost time,” she said.

We did just that, and the night had turned to gray-blue morning before we found sleep, Judy beside me, her soft, round breasts pressed tightly against my chest.

I don’t know why, but I had maybe a funny feeling that maybe I should check in with Hawk again before moving in on Hassouk. So I put a call in the next morning. It turned out to be an important call, though just how important I didn’t realize at the time.

“I’m glad to hear from you, Nick.” The Chief’s flat, New England accent came over the wire. “Willem Willoets was found dead today, a suicide.”

“Willoets, the head of the International Arms Commission?” I asked.

“The same,” Hawk said. “Just for your information, he was in Arabia up to a few days ago, spent six months there on arms problems. Funny how it happened. No one would have known about it for three days, maybe more. It seems he left the suicide note in his office in Amsterdam — he was a Hollander, you know. He put it there after his secretary left for a three-day vacation. But it seems she forgot something and came back late that night and found the note. She called the police, told them Willoets had a secret hideaway cottage in the Black Forest in Bavaria, and maybe he’d gone there to be alone. Thinking they might stop him, the Dutch police called the Bavarians, who spent the better part of a day looking for the cottage. When they found it, it was a smoking ruin with Willoets’ body, burned beyond recognition, inside. A fire-proof identification tag on him gave them his identity.”

“What seems odd about it?” I asked.

“Only that no one knows of any damned reason why Willoets should have committed suicide, except there was a rumor he was being investigated. Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Every little bit helps,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

I hung up and thought about what I’d just heard. But all I came up with were a lot of “maybes” and “ifs” and “supposes,” so I put it aside. I had a confirmed pigeon in my sights by the name of Ibn Hassouk, and first things first.

I couldn’t know, then, how many interwoven strands this carpet had.

Chapter 6

Pink marble and gold, deep blue drapes, a small orchestra, tables running the length of the huge hall piled high with food, the sweeping line of a gracious stairway at the far end of the hall and people crowding the floor. That was the scene in Ibn Hassouk’s ballroom inside the main house.

I stood to one side and observed it. Hassouk hadn’t shown yet, but he had plenty of hostesses scattered about, girls in cream-white minidresses with necklines plunging to the navel. Cool-eyed girls from many lands, speaking many languages and making the guests feel at home.

Judy said that Hassouk indicated that any style of comfortable dress was in order, that his parties were meant for people to enjoy. I’d bought new slacks, a black turtleneck and a cream-white jacket almost the same tone as the dresses the hostesses wore. Judy was wearing a deep-red cocktail dress that made her skin glow and accentuated her full breasts provocatively.

Waiting for Hassouk to appear, I studied the other guests. There were Indians, Chinese, Indonesians, Europeans; some men with women, others alone. Most of the men bore the stamp of the career government officials, men who’d worked their way up from minor bureauocratic roles to well-placed positions of importance. Judy had already been swept away to dance by three different men. During one of the intervals, I questioned her as she stood beside me.

“Do you know any of these people?” I asked.

She nodded. “A few, those Fred had contacts with from time to time,” she said. “That tall man talking to the girl in pink is Hendricks, Canadian Trade Commission. That’s Henri Jacquar, with the purple sash, talking with the Indian in the turban. He’s with the French Military Mission here. The tall, reddish-haired man is Lord Boxley, British Consulate, and the small man with the little beard is Willem Willoets, International Arms Control Commission.”

I looked at her sharply, and she frowned at my expression.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Are you sure that’s Willoets?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“There’s no question about it,” she said. “He visited Fred at the office a number of times.”

I looked at the man Judy said was Willem Willoets. He was small, wiry and kept clenching and unclenching his hands nervously. His dark eyes darted about the room, looked up toward the long stairway at the far end. His expression was strained, anxious. He looked like a man under great pressure, but he was very much alive.

My mind raced. A suicide note left by a man who was standing in the same room with me. A body burned beyond recognition in a secret cottage hideaway. They believed it was Willoets, and they believed it because it had been set up that way. “It would have been days before we’d have learned whose body was in that cottage,” Hawk had said.

Meanwhile, Willoets was here at Hassouk’s. My eyes narrowed as I watched the anxious, nervous little man. First Danvers had been involved with Hassouk, now Willoets, and God knew how many more key men. Had Willard Egmont been mixed up with him, too, a few years back in Hong Kong? This was no Johnny-come-lately operation. I was already convinced that Hassouk was in the procuring market. I was wondering how much besides girls he was procuring, and why.

My thoughts were interrupted as the orchestra broke into a short ruffle of drums. All eyes turned to the top of the stairs, mine included, and I saw Ibn Hassouk there, a tall woman at his side. The guests began to applaud as Hassouk started down the stairs, his round face sliding easily into a smooth, oily smile.

He was big and fat, with a hint of muscle beneath the layers of lard. His face was tanned, his straight hair was carefully combed, and he kept the expression of bland geniality on his round face. There was something undeveloped about that face; it made him look like a chubby kid who hadn’t outgrown his baby fat. But the eyes were totally opposed to that picture. They were shrewd, hard, shifting black ice. I saw them sweep the crowd, linger for a moment as they spotted me. Then I saw the almost physical shock strike them as Willem Willoets pushed his way through the crowd.

The Dutchman and Hassouk spoke for a second; Hassouk had trouble preserving his oily smile. The tense, short exchange ended with Willoets moving quickly away. I observed the man’s movements, saw him go up the long staircase to the second floor. A eunuch appeared at the head of the stairs. Willoets spoke to him, and the servant led the Dutchman along a hallway and out of my sight.

If Hassouk was going to join Willoets later, I wanted to be there, if I could find a way. Meanwhile, I turned my attention back to Hassouk, who was busy greeting people, playing the genial host. I caught the eyes of the woman at his side. They were watching me, and I looked her up and down in her floor-length straight gown of shimmering gold.

Regal in bearing, black hair piled high atop her head, she could have stepped off the wall of an ancient Egyptian tomb, out of a Persian print, a Chinese silk painting of the Han period, or a Twelfth Century medieval tapestry. Hers was a face of timeless beauty, an echo of many lands, many cultures, many peoples. Only her eyes, dark, unnaturally bright, somehow voracious, broke the otherwise serene beauty of it.

Hassouk make his way through the crowd in a slow circle, a whale moving through an ocean of lesser fish. The woman moved beside him, with him, yet somehow alone. Finally he was before me. I saw the quick glance he threw at Judy, and then at the woman.

“Welcome to the house of Ibn Hassouk, Mr. Wilson.” Hassouk smiled, thick lips spreading like an oil slick. He looked me over, appraising, estimating, a trader judging the merchandise before him with shrewd, experienced eyes. I’d been appraised before, that wasn’t new, but this man looked at me as if I were up for sale, a slave on the block.

But I was here to strike my own bargain. I turned to the woman beside him and saw that her eyes were also appraising me, though in a different way. Hers burned with an intensely personal gaze while Hassouk’s were the impassive eyes of the tobacco buyer, the silk merchant.

“This is my assistant, Karana,” he said, waving a soft, manicured hand at the woman. “In a few moments, dancing girls will appear to entertain my guests. They will not miss me for a little while. Come, I believe we have some things to discuss. This way, please.”

He moved off, walking lightly and quickly for so hugely round a body, Karana beside him and Judy hurrying to keep pace with my strides. We moved down a beautifully decorated arched corridor. I inhaled the faint odor of jasmine and roses again as I walked behind Karana.

Hassouk led the way into a library so thickly carpeted it was like walking on air. In a moment a towering figure came in carrying a tray and a fresh bottle of brandy. The bald head glinted in the light of the room and the eyes met mine for a brief instant, impassive, veiled eyes. Hassouk smiled.

“Of course you remember Tomas,” he said. “You have met, after a fashion.”

“After a fashion,” I said smiling. “And more often than Tomas knows. The laundry is sometimes delivered by temporary help.”

I saw the giant’s eyes widen for an instant and then recover their look of veiled hostility. Hassouk’s eyebrows had gone up, and now he smiled as he shook his head slowly, glancing at the big bald eunuch.

“So, Tomas, we learn something new every day,” Hassouk fixed me with a studied glance. “I would be surprised, ordinarily, but you have furnished me with a continuous procession of surprises, Mr. Wilson. I like your style. Your manner of getting here to see me, for example. Unsubtle, but effective.”

“Thanks,” I interjected dryly.

“But it is more than style, of course,” Hassouk went on. “You saw through a most cleverly designed trap. You turned the tables on the woman we sent after you. Then you killed one of my best men, and then, four more of my men. I’d say that was a sizable accomplishment, one that has impressed me.”

“You’re leaving out the most important item,” I said. “The letter I recovered.”

Hassouk’s smile had ice around the edges. “Ah, yes, the letter,” he said. “It no doubt told you something about my operation, but I don’t think it told you very much, though I admit I wonder how much more you have put together. However, all that has happened has helped me put together a few things too.”

He took a sip of brandy, rolled it around on his tongue and then swallowed it. “For example,” he went on, “I do not believe your name is Ted Wilson. I doubt that such a man even exists in your organization. You see, I make it my business to learn all I can about every espionage agency’s personnel, just as I do the personnel of various foreign ministries, commissions, and similar organizations. AXE, while the most difficult to learn anything about, was not impossible — thanks to men like Mr. Danvers. From the way you outwitted my people, from the ingenuity you showed in adjusting to unexpected situations, the way you used this charming creature,” he nodded toward Judy, “to get to me, I have drawn a picture of only one man, a man named Nick Carter, AXE Agent N3.”

He smiled, waiting, and I nodded. “One for you,” I admitted. “And now you’re wondering what kind of a bargain I want to make.”

He nodded, his lips caught in a faint, sardonic smile, pleased with himself.

“I want a piece of the action, whatever it is,” I said. “You’ve got something going here, something bigger than just a stray shot of blackmail at men like Danvers. I’ve been an AXE agent now for too many years. What have I got to show for it? Memories, scars and peanuts. I’ve had it, pal. I want something for myself. I want money, my dear Hassouk, money and lots of it. I’ve had all the glory I need. I’m turning it in for cash.”

I was conscious of Judy’s mouth dropping open in shock and disbelief. I couldn’t have warned her. Her reaction of unfeigned horror was just what I wanted, completely and totally natural. I didn’t look at her but kept my eyes on Hassouk.

“Understandable,” he said. “I’ve often wondered what makes a man of your talents labor so hard and so dangerously for so little material value.” He wasn’t kidding; it was undoubtedly something way past his comprehension, which was fine with me for the moment. “Frankly,” he went on, “a man of your talents would be very valuable to my organization.”

He toyed with his brandy snifter. “But for such an arrangement — and it would indeed make you very wealthy — I must have the Danvers letter and film back.”

I threw back my head and laughed, and saw his icy smile. Karana was also watching me intently, her beautiful face composed, expressionless.

“You can’t be serious, my dear Hassouk,” I said. “We are both too shrewd for that kind of a maneuver. That letter is not only my partnership agreement but my insurance policy. If anything happens to me, it is to be mailed to my office at once. Come now, you surprise me, to think that I would be so gullible.”

He shrugged. “One has to try,” he said, and then he hit me with the unexpected, with the stinking, dirty part. “But I, too, must have evidence of your sincerity. You want me to take you in, to open my operation to you, when all this may be merely a device to find out more than you know.”

“Try me,” I said. “You’ll get evidence. Time will tell.”

But Hassouk didn’t want time, he wanted immediate proof, and he struck back in a diabolically clever, cunning way, a typically Arab response that turned the tables in one brief instant.

“I want the girl,” he said, nodding toward Judy. “She will fit our qualifications ideally.”

My heart leaped and screamed out a silent cry of anguish, the more so because I knew there was only one answer I could give. I had to play it through. Ruthless opportunism was the role I’d chosen, and ruthless opportunists don’t shrink back from destroying others. If I showed the slightest sign of balking, Hassouk would pull back and close the door. I couldn’t have that, not when I was standing on the threshold. The bastard had mouse-trapped me, damned his rotten, clever soul, and I had to play it through, no matter what.

Hassouk and Karana were watching me intently. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. “She’s yours,” I said. “My compliments.”

I heard Judy gasp, then: “What are you saying?” she cried. “What is this?”

I gave her a cold glance. “It’s a hard world, baby,” I said. “It’s dog eat dog. Just relax and it won’t be so bad.”

Her hazel eyes were shocked pools of betrayed fury, as disbelief turned to anger. “You bloody bastard! You dirty, rotten, stinking bastard.”

I caught Hassouk’s small gesture to the bald giant, saw the man move catlike to come up behind Judy. He spun the girl around and smashed her across the face with his huge hand. She screamed and fell to the floor where she looked up at me, a trickle of blood running from her lips, eyes blinking, too astounded to know where she hurt most, inside or out. I was betting on inside. As I glanced at her indifferently, she burst into tears.

The big eunuch reached down and, with one hand, ripped the front of her dress and brassiere off, exposing her to the waist. He reached down, picked her up and slapped her again. She screamed in pain. I could sense Hassouk and Karana watching me and I kept my face blank, immobile. Tomas picked Judy up under one arm and disappeared out a rear door of the library with her, a small, helpless package of sobbing, crushed and destroyed trust.

“This is excellent brandy,” I said to Hassouk, draining my glass. His smile broadened and he exchanged glances with Karana. Her face was still a smooth, expressionless study in perfection.

“I think we have just concluded a bargain, Carter,” he said.

I nodded, trying to keep self-disgust from making me throw up. It had worked. Hassouk could understand ruthlessness. He could understand immorality. It was an admirable combination of traits to him. I forced myself to stop hearing Judy’s sobs inside my mind, to stop seeing the shattered look in her eyes. I’d try to make it up to her before this was over, I promised silently, and turned my gaze on Karana. The controlled sensuousness of the woman was fantastic, like the latent danger in a jungle cat.

“There’s more than the Danvers bit, of course,” I tossed out casually. “If I’m going to be of help, I’ve got to know everything.”

Hassouk seemed more than willing, proud in fact, to show me now. I had passed the test, for the moment at least. Until I should prove myself false, he was going to go along with me.

“I will show you briefly through our operation, then I must return to my guests,” he said. “Karana will come with us. We operate on the highest levels, Carter, but like most organizations, we still retain our ordinary unspectacular side, which is the ordinary slave trade.”

Noting the faint lift of my eyebrows, he laughed, a deep nimble fighting its way up through the layers of flesh.

“You are bothered by the ordinary slave trade,” he commented. “Your modern Western built-in distaste of slavery is offended. Well, we maintain it more as a convenience for old suppliers and clients than anything else, but you must remember that slavery is an ancient tradition, not without ample honor in your world.”

I looked hard at him but he wasn’t kidding.

“You in the West like to delude yourselves that only backward, primitive peoples practised slavery. Nothing could be more wrong. The ancient Greeks, whom you revere for their ageless wisdom and philosophy and learning, held slavery to be a part of normal society. The Romans, with their matchless contributions to Western culture in architecture, government and law, built their vast empires on slavery. But you needn’t go back that far. Your own American Constitution, ringing with words of freedom, was drafted by men who apparently saw no conflict in maintaining slaves. And the time is coming when the world may once again recognize the place of slavery in life.”

“Meanwhile, we carry on the old tradition, eh?” I said. “For a profit.”

“Always for a profit.” Hassouk laughed. “Come. Follow me into the next building.”

He led the way, Karana beside him and I walking slightly behind her, gazing at the softly rolling movement of her buttocks within the gold sheath. I was convinced she wore nothing whatever under the gown, and yet there was not a line to break the smooth, flowing contour of her body, not even the faint, outward thrust of a nipple.

We walked past the laundry rooms in the next building, where I had already been once, and down a short corridor that suddenly opened into a cell-block set of rooms, stone and unbarred, with wall shackles. Chained to opposite walls was a line of women and one of men. The men, mostly Arabs, Chinese and Africans, were naked. The women wore thin burlap smocks, sacklike garments open at the sides.

I asked why the men were naked and Hassouk said “The eunuchs like to amuse themselves. But they have orders not to damage the merchandise in any way.”

As we walked down the twin rows of captives, I saw Karana, eyes burning, intent, looking at the men’s genitals. “And sometimes,” Hassouk said, giving her a sidelong glance, “sometimes we find one worth keeping a while ourselves.”

I listened while Hassouk briefed me on current market prices for a good male slave and a good female work slave. The trade was mostly within the domestic market in the Middle East.

“Karana would like me to phase out the ordinary trade,” Hassouk said. “But I feel it necessary. It is a way into many other places for us. Perhaps, one day, we will cut back, or perhaps turn this division over to a concession.”

He was totally unaware of the monstrous incongruity of his use of modern corporative business terms in relation to the traffic in human lives. Or was it so incongruous, I wondered. He was merely applying today’s business practices to an ancient trade, up-dating his operation. Like everything else in this land, the incongruous seemed quite reasonable.

“Now downstairs to the dungeons,” he said, leading the way down a flight of wide, stone steps and through a doorway guarded by one of the bare-chested eunuchs.

The first thing that greeted me as we entered a long lamplit stone dungeon was Judy’s voice raised in a horrible, anguished scream. Then I saw her, naked, strapped on top of a big wooden wheel that revolved slowly. At the bottom of its revolution was a trough of bubbling, boiling water.

As I watched, Judy passed over the trough, just close enough so her breasts and her stomach dipped into the water. Once again her screams split the air. As she came up from the water, the first face she saw belonged to Tomas, standing beside the wheel. Three more eunuchs were positioned along its slow turn, so she saw each one as she passed by.

The wheel halted. Judy was taken down and dragged to the wall and a pile of straw and shackled to the by her wrists. Tomas pressed her one reddened breast with his finger, and she shrieked in pain. The bald giant grinned.

“Everything done here is done with careful calculation,” Hassouk said. “The nearly scalding water will not mar her. We apply medication to prevent that. She is merely feeling the pain. We can’t injure any of the girls physically, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, fighting to keep my voice under control. We moved on and I saw that the rest of the dungeon held some ten girls, all naked, all shackled to the walls, all in various states of terror and sobbing exhaustion.

I watched Tomas and one of the eunuchs pull one girl up and unchain her. She opened her eyes, saw them and began to scream in pure terror. Tomas looked back at Hassouk who nodded, and they dragged the girl up the stairs, still screaming.

“She has been beaten almost continuously for three to four days,” Hassouk said, and must have seen the disbelief in my eyes. The girl’s body was unmarked, young and beautiful. “We beat her where there will be no marks left to scar or show,” Hassouk explained. “Rubber hoses on the bottom of her feet, across the fleshy part of her buttocks, on top of her head. Believe me, we have an effective treatment, as her screams made plain. You see, here the girls are brought to a state of complete physical and emotional collapse. They are brutalized and terrorized and with every beating, every pain-filled experience, a man is there administering it. Wherever they look, one of my eunuchs is there, and then the treatment is abruptly halted and they are taken upstairs. We apply, to these girls, the latest of medical and psychological knowledge. These girls are our specially trained operatives. But come, let me show you.”

He proceeded up the stairs to the second floor of the building. I found myself in a smaller room where six naked girls sat in straight-backed chairs, each girl rigged with an array of electrodes, wires and other electrical apparatus. Their eyes were mostly closed, or half-closed, and they seemed in a trance.

“They are being indoctrinated through electronic brainwashing methods,” Hassouk said. “At this point, when the brutalizing has completely stripped away all psychic defenses, their hatred of men is reinforced by subtler methods. They are taught that they will do anything the male wants because they know he will pay for it. Brainwashing by this electronic method, at this point of psychic defenselessness, results in absolute control of the individual.”

He walked over to an instrument panel and turned a knob. A recorded voice came from a speaker on the panel.

“When is a slave not a slave?” it intoned. “When he is a master. When is a slave not a slave. When he is a master.”

“An old Arab proverb,” Hassouk said, turning the sound down again. “This technique makes them completely acquiescent in anything. They become slaves who believe they are truly masters of the hate object, the male. We bend their minds, then psyches beyond repair. After this phase they are taken into another part of the building where they are taught every bit of erotic knowledge known in this world, where they become experts in pleasing the male, specialists in every form of erotica. There they are pampered, given luxuries and rewards they never dreamed existed, an abrupt reversal of all they have undergone up to this point. It is a specialized, practical application of the modern techniques of terror, psychic vulnerability, mind control and reward.”

Hassouk had finished, and I was more than impressed. I was aghast at the fiendish thoroughness of the man. And I was convinced that all this was not just for occasional blackmail, or for the relatively minor profits of the ordinary slave trade. Obviously there was more, much more, behind it.

“Then these specially trained and controlled girls are supplied by you to men such as Danvers,” I offered.

“We don’t merely supply, Carter,” he said. “We seek out the client and then use the girls to exploit him. With the girls we furnish for his particular fancy and with what they know of eroticism, he becomes hooked, as thoroughly as any drug addict is hooked.”

“And he becomes your slave,” I finished.

“Exactly.” Hassouk nodded. “His life, his career could be ruined at any time by us. Our girls are taught to furnish us filmstrips, of which we make good use. But you know Carter, most of our clients fear that we’ll stop supplying them with girls more than they fear being in bondage to us. That’s how addicted they become.”

“And you keep supplying new girls,” I said.

“Always,” he said. “We cannot risk our control techniques beyond a few months at a time, and it makes our clients think we are considering their taste for variety. The girls returned to us we usually dispose of. We have found they cannot stand a second series of treatments.”

Hassouk turned to Karana. “Let us move on to the final phase and then return to the party. I must spend some time with the guests. And there is someone I must speak to privately.”

That someone would be the supposed suicide, Willoets. I followed as they led me through opulent quarters where more girls were luxuriously relaxing, bare-busted, inviting. Once again, I noted cool, distant expression in their eyes, but now I knew what it meant. They were controlled beings, erotic robots, human beings whose minds and emotions had been leveled off to concern themselves with only one thing: sex and the pleasures of the senses. All else — anger, pain, humiliation, love — had been excluded, eliminated by the devilishly clever techniques Hassouk had developed.

Finally the tour ended, and we returned to the main ballroom. Hassouk left me immediately, but Karana lingered a moment. “You are quite a man, Carter,” she said, studying me. “When I saw how you outmaneuvered us and made a shambles of our plans, I wanted very much to meet you.”

I looked at her perfect face, every feature a finely-carved work of art, and her eyes watched me, intent, burning with a wild inner fire.

“Now you’ve met me,” I said. “Disappointed?”

“I will be,” she said grimly. It was a cryptic remark, and she didn’t amplify on it. When she left me, as another guest, waved to her, I got hold of a double bourbon and downed it in one swallow. I’ve been given a glimpse into a diabolical Hell on earth, a satanic wedding of the worst of the old and the new. But Hassouk’s briefing hadn’t told me what I most wanted to know: the motivation behind it.

Hassouk enjoyed his game of making slaves into masters, I knew, but it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t a coincidence that all of his clients seemed to be men in high positions in governmental circles. Danvers, and now Willoets, were only two examples. If I could get to Willoets, I might have a lot of the answers quickly enough to spare Judy any more horror. Above all, I had to get her free before they brought her to that emotional and mental point-of-no-return. God knew how I’d ever be able to make it up to her, make her understand. But for the time being I had to go on playing my chosen role. One false move, one wrong step and I’d be dead. I had to keep Hassouk believing I was a ruthless opportunist, until I had all I needed to nail him.

Staying on the edge of the crowd, I finally saw Hassouk disengage himself from the party and start up the stairs. Tomas moved in behind him, a silent giant shadow on bare feet following his master, who was on his way to see Willoets. I’d bet the Dutchman had been cooling his heels in one of the second floor rooms all this time. I edged out onto a side terrace that looked out over a heavily shrubbed garden. Luckily, the terrace was empty.

Leaving my drink on the stone balustrade, I slipped over the railing and dropped the few feet to the garden. I ran along the wall of the house to where the far corner rose in darkness, away from the lights of the party.

I silently thanked the Arabs for their architectural love of cornices and insets and arched designs. They were all helpful as places to get a handgrip, a foothold. I crawled up the corner like some big beetle, moving slowly, inch by inch. The second floor of the house sported a long set-in balcony. I edged my way to the rail and pulled myself over.

The arched windows were unlocked, and I felt my way across a dark room and out into a dim hallway. From far down at the other end of the house came the sounds of the party going on below, and I could see the reflection of the lights. I made my way in that direction, passing an impressive stairway at the farthest end of the corridor. There were rooms on both sides. Willoets and Hassouk would be in one of them.

It wasn’t hard to find which one. Their voices were raised in anger, especially Hassouk’s.

“What utter idiocy to come here!” I heard him say, as I flattened myself against the closed door, and then I heard Willoets’ answer:

“They won’t find the body at my cottage for days. I tell you,” he said. “They won’t even find the suicide note I left at the office for three days. My secretary has gone away for a long weekend. And I set fire to the cottage myself. Everything is taken care of perfectly, according to plan.”

“Then why didn’t you stay in the hotel, as we agreed?” Hassouk shouted. “I told you I was going to send my men to get you there.”

“But they didn’t come and I got worried.” The Dutchman was whining now. “You promised they’d be there last night. You promised I’d be taken care of for the rest of my life. That I’d have Kitty and Suzie and Anna — anyone I wanted. I kept my end of the bargain, and then no one came for me. Of course I got worried!”

“My men were a little delayed, that was all,” Hassouk said, his voice calmer but with a note of disgust in it. “I’ll keep my promise at once, my good fellow. You just wait here a moment or two longer and we’ll arrange to have you safely out of here.”

Hassouk switched to Arabic, speaking to Tomas, and I glanced around wildly for a place to disappear into. The only chance was a closed door across the hall. I dived for it. If the door was locked or the room was occupied, I’d had it. But the door wasn’t locked and the room was dark and empty. I crouched by the door, leaving it ajar enough to peer out. Hassouk was being more cooperative than he knew. He came out of the other room with Tomas, and they stood only inches from where I crouched, Hassouk talking in low, terse tones.

“Have two men take him to the cellar where all the rugs are ready to be taken to Sheik Al Habib Haba,” Hassouk said. “They are to kill him and wrap him in one of the carpets. The caravan is due in the morning. He will leave with the rest of the rugs. I will send a messenger to the Sheik, with my apologies. Al Habib Haba will understand. I have done many favors for him.”

“Yes, master,” the big eunuch answered. I stayed crouched as he and Hassouk moved back across the hall. “Use the back stairway at the end of the corridor,” I heard Hassouk add.

I waited ten seconds after they’d gone back into the other room, then streaked down the corridor to find that back stairway. It was there, almost hidden, a narrow stone descent in the corner of the wall where the corridor ended. I went down it, following its twisting, narrow, dank path. There was a level landing at the main floor, and then the stair wound its way down further and I followed it. Suddenly there was a door in front of me. I pushed on it carefully. It swung open and I found myself not, as I’d expected, in the basement, but in a low subterranean airspace underneath the house. I turned to go back but the door wouldn’t open from that side. There wasn’t even a handle.

“Dammit to hell,” I swore. Obviously, I realized too late, the way to the basement was to turn off the narrow stairs at the main floor and take another route. I started running, not very successfully because I couldn’t rise above a crouch. I found I was in a dark labyrinth of passageways, drainage spaces and sewer pipe outlets beneath the main house.

Feeling like a mouse in a laboratory maze, I ran in my awkward crouch from one passage to another, each one either a dead end or leading me into another aimless search. Meanwhile, Willoets was being taken to the basement to be murdered and that was what I wanted to stop. If I could get to the Dutchman in time, I was certain I could blow this whole thing wide open here and now, before it went any further, before Judy had to face more tortures of the damned. But I was trapped here, in these hellish passages of blackness, groping, stumbling along in a back-breaking crouch.

The damned stairway had led down here and the damned door opened only one way, so there had to be another way out. I ran faster, bumping along from rough wall to wall, going wildly from passage to passage as the precious moments ticked away. I was starting to get frantic. Not only was I missing my chance to save Willoets and crack this thing, but sooner or later Karana or Hassouk would start searching for me at the party. If I were still trapped down here when it ended, I might as well stay here.

Suddenly, as I felt my way along one of the passageways, I realized that one wall was cold. That meant only one thing: it was an outside wall. I moved along it quickly, feeling my way with both hands like a blind man. The wall grew colder and suddenly I bumped into the end of the passageway. I felt a door, again without a handle or a knob. I leaned against it and it opened, and I was outside, in the night air.

I saw I was in a ravine, a kind of drainage ditch that ran along the back of the main house. I followed it and pitched face forward to the ground as, almost directly in front of me, a door opened and two eunuchs emerged. They walked up a short flight of steps directly opposite the door and disappeared on the ground level above.

I waited a moment, then moved forward. This door did have a handle, and it opened as I pulled on it. Angry at what I knew must already have happened, I had to make sure, to be certain. I found myself in the basement this time, and some two dozen carpets were on the floor, all tightly rolled up. Each had a thick stuffing of heavy paper at the end, pushed down into the center of the roll; each was tied with three lengths of cord.

To yank out the paper wadding was no faster than cutting the cord holding the carpets, but it would save me time later when I had to roll everything up again. If I was too late — and I was damned sure I was now — I wanted to leave everything nice and neat.

I was about half through the collection of carpets when I found him. I’d looked into rolls of beautiful Arabian weaving, into Chinese, Armenian, Afghan and Persian carpets. They’d stuffed Willoets in a deep-piled Persian rug. I unrolled him and saw the neat little hole in his shirt. They’d even covered it with adhesive tape, so it wouldn’t stain the carpet. I put my face to his lips, felt the faint brush of air. Damned if he wasn’t still alive, barely, but alive. I massaged his wrists, the back of his neck. I sat him up and spoke to him. His eyelids fluttered and then opened, his dry lips moved soundlessly.

“Willoets,” I said. “Listen to me, man. What were you and Hassouk involved in?”

I slapped his face gently and saw the eyes waver. He tried to talk, and a few words formed themselves.

“Was it just the women?” I asked in his ear. “Try shaking your head instead of talking.”

Willoets tried it. He started to shake his head to say “no,” or I thought he did. I couldn’t be sure. His head half-turned to one side, then fell back in the limpness of death. I bent down to him again. There was no more breath escaping those dry lips. He was dead, this time, for real.

I rolled the carpet up again, stuffing its grisly contents back inside and retied the cords. I stuffed the paper back into the center hole, top and bottom. No one would know the rug had been touched.

I walked out of the basement, up the short flight of steps to the outside. Certain things were growing clearer. They weren’t enough to move against Hassouk with openly. I still had no real evidence — they’d dump Willoets someplace quick, if I tried anything just yet. But I was beginning to get the full picture. -

Hassouk with his controlled slave girls and Willoets with — what? With a damned important mess of information, that’s what. He had information worth millions. It was generally known, for instance, that the International Arms Commission was going to try to impose an arms embargo on certain nations, those they felt were endangering the peace of a given area. If Willoets had given Hassouk advance secret information on which nations were slated for embargo, it could have been sold for millions to the countries concerned. It would have allowed them to purchase military equipment before the embargo was announced, to stockpile munitions and arms, to nullify the effect of any embargo.

And that meant that Hassouk’s operation moved on two distinct but interlocking levels. His slave market was one level, and he used the slaves — and his sex robots — to deal in something much bigger and deadlier. I walked to the front of the house and slipped inside. One thing was all important. I had a foothold in the inner circle. I had to stay there no matter what it cost, until I had the evidence to pull Hassouk down.

The party was thinning out, and I found Karana standing alone near the grand stairway. “I have been looking for you,” she said, eyeing me.

“I was outside, in the gardens,” I lied, smiling pleasantly.

“Now that you are one of us, you will stay here,” she said. “We’ll send for your things in the morning. Let me show you to your rooms.”

As we started up the stairs, I noticed the bald giant, Tomas, watching me, and if looks really could kill I would have dropped dead right there. I’d made myself a dangerous enemy.

Karana led me into a suite of elegance, richly draped, thickly carpeted, with a huge bed. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t one of Hassouk’s empty-eyed girls. Hers glittered and snapped and devoured as she looked me up and down again.

“Earlier, you said you would be disappointed in me,” I recalled. “What did you mean?”

Her eyes held mine with that strange burning intensity. “If I return tonight you will find out,” she answered and abruptly turned away, gliding from the room like a sleek, golden panther, her breasts swaying under the gold sheath.

The suite had a liquor cabinet, and I made a nightcap for myself and undressed, sinking down on the big, soft bed. I had put the lights out and was beginning to doze off when I caught the sound of a door being opened. I sat up and by the moonlight streaming in through the arched window, saw Karana’s tall figure, black hair piled high atop her head, move toward the bed. I lay back, waiting.

The gold of her gown shimmered in the moon-fight as she approached. Making no move, no sound, I watched as she came to the bed, her eyes shining with that unearthly brightness even in the pale fight of the moon. Lifting her arms, she pulled off the sheath, and I saw she had on a transparent silk body stocking. Reaching back, she pulled it forward, stepped out of it and stood before me, a goddess with magnificent large breasts, standing out like those of a small high-busted girl. Her hips, large and womanly, her flat abdomen excitingly into the deep, dark triangle of desire.

I swung my legs around and stood up, feeling burning passion rising in me. The terrible, devouring sensuality of the woman reached out and swept me along. Then she reached out physically. Her hand sought me and there was a terrible, bright urgency in her eyes now. I put one hand between her legs, lifted and swung her around and tossed her onto the bed.

I leaped at her and she clawed at me, not to drive me away but to coax me on. Her firm breasts slammed into my chest, and I found then-large, rounded nipples with my lips. As I pulled on them slowly, Karana began to move her torso on the bed, sliding back and forth in a subtle rhythm, in time with my mouth on her breasts. No words were spoken but her lips made small, animal cries of pleasure, and I was spurred on.

She flung herself onto me, exploring my body with her lips. Her hands on my back were digging in, drawing blood. Her body, magnificent as it was, never waited to be enjoyed as she drove both of us forward with a whirlwind of desire. Karana turned to me, and as I took her, spoke her first words of lovemaking, a plea and a command, a hope and a desire.

“Harder,” she breathed. “More... more. Don’t be afraid.”

She flung her hips forward, spasmodic, rapid motions, reaching, stretching, straining, and it was beyond probability that there could be any tenderness and subtlety with Karana. She wanted only force, almost cruel force, and I came down upon her with the same matching lunges.

I saw her serene face break open in an open-mouthed near-cry, her lips drawn back. I slowed my rhythm, and she moaned and begged. I slowed some more and her excitability was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Suddenly I changed rhythm and moved hard and fast.

She responded as if to the whip, half-crying, her nails digging into my back, and still she held back, or could not reach the peak. I had never known a woman to outlast me, but this heaving, straining goddess, continued to want more and more, and now she broke into sobs, deep, guttural sobs torn from some inner hiding place. And then I knew what she had meant, about being certain of disappointment.

I grew angry, tensed every muscle and began a different technique. A rhythm that made haste slowly. I felt her body responding, saw her lips parting in wonder as she suddenly felt things she had never felt before. Her eyes snapped open, and now there was protest in them. They were telling me to stop, and there was fear in their glittering depths.

But I didn’t stop. I pressed on, faster and faster, yet without really rushing. Her eyes widened and her body began to tremble and then, with a cry that reached back into the caves of antiquity, the wombs of primeval women, she reached her climax and her scream lay in the night, a sound she had never allowed any man to hear before.

I moved from her and she lay there, eyes wide, staring up at me with that fear that was beyond ordinary fear, an expression I had never seen in any woman’s eyes. Finally she rose, wordlessly, slipped on the sheath only and looked down at me as I lay on the bed. With the look of fear, there was hate and a frown of disbelief. She gazed at me for a long moment, then turned and left, still saying nothing.

I lay still after she’d gone and thought about it. Anger when there should have been gratitude. Fear where there should have been pleasure. I wondered what it all meant, and had the feeling I’d be sorry when I found out.

Chapter 7

Under the pretense of wanting me to learn each phase of the operation, Hassouk also played a game of watchful waiting. In the morning, I was shown down to the dungeons again, this time by Tomas. As he plodded silently on bare feet ahead of me, I studied the breadth of that huge back and admired the ripple of the muscles.

The big eunuch was in charge of things down here, and he took a fiendish delight in his work with Judy. Torture, I knew, replaced sex for many of the eunuchs, but as Tomas administered the prescribed beatings to Judy, his eyes constantly flicked over toward me. He was watching for any sign that would betray my feelings, that would reflect the sick, cold anguish inside me.

Judy, conscious enough for the most part to see me, continued to reflect a shattered heart in her eyes, almost as if no physical pain could touch her. But the physical pain did touch her, and her pitiful screams tore around inside my head, stabbing shafts of guilt.

I was relieved when Hassouk appeared, late in the morning, and brought me upstairs to show me a shipment of slaves destined for the ordinary run-of-the-mill market. There were two strong men and three big rawboned girls. Bound by their hands and feet and gagged, they were being loaded into a small van for transportation to the desert where a camel train would take them to one Sheik Abdullah El Kefa.

Hassouk went into a long lecture on how to select the right qualities in a slave for a man like El Kefa who wanted work out of them, not pleasure. Either he was satisfied that I really wanted to learn the business, or he was putting on a helluva good act. I couldn’t be sure, so I listened like any eager apprentice. Hassouk was called to the phone, and as he left, said he’d see me after the noontime rest period, due to begin in a few minutes.

I found Tomas at my elbow, and the giant pointedly showed me to my quarters. No one had said I couldn’t go where I pleased, yet I had the feeling I was somehow subtly caged. In my rooms, I stripped, lay down on the bed as the noontime heat beat down on the building. I hadn’t closed my eyes long when Karana came into the room. She wore white jodhpurs and a white blouse. Her eyes fastened on me, burning with that extra brightness I now recognized as pure lust, a lust that, until last night, had never been satisfied.

“I gather you weren’t disappointed,” I said casually.

She didn’t answer but unbuttoned her blouse, stepped out of the jodhpurs and came at me. Merely seeing the lust in her had sent my own blood boiling, and the pressure of her breasts upon my chest was more than enough. I threw her down on the thick carpet. She lay there, shaking, quivering, wanting, but her eyes were filled with hate.

“No,” she murmured. “No,” while her body was asking for mine. I dropped onto her — naked flesh, naked desire, intensity beyond all intensity, igniting, inflaming, sending a shock wave through me that could not be denied. I took Karana, matching every thrust, watching her beautiful face grow strained and anxious and fearful until finally, once again, came that primeval cry, that prolonged, breathless scream of defeat and ecstasy combined.

Her body trembling, she rose up on one elbow and gazed at me with disbelief and hatred. “You did it again,” she said. “Again.”

She put on her clothes, turned to me and there was a frightened, fearful sadness in her eyes, besides the cold anger. Turning, she strode from the room. I went to the door, yanking on my pants on the way, and saw her going toward Hassouk’s private quarters. I frowned. I couldn’t read this dish at all, but I decided to follow her.

I got as far as the main arched corridor, saw the guard she’d brushed past and cut across to a series of arched windows. They led along the wall of Hassouk’s quarters. A ledge of pink marble, plenty wide enough, ran under them. On hands and knees, keeping my head low, I moved slowly along the ledge, grateful it was the noontime rest period when no one would be in the courtyard or out on the grounds. I moved on until I heard Karana’s voice, then lay flat beneath the window, pressed against the ledge.

“Do away with him,” I heard her say. “Get rid of him.”

“Why don’t you trust him?” Hassouk asked. “You have given me no reason, and he has certainly passed the tests we have given him. I think he would be extremely valuable to us. He is ruthless, unprincipled, the kind of man we need. And there is the letter, may I remind you.”

“Risk the letter,” she said. “Perhaps he is only bluffing.”

Her voice was strained, the tone bitter. I frowned. I didn’t understand her at all.

“You are upset for some reason, my dear,” Hassouk said. I could picture his little eyes darting back and forth. “Take him to the discipline pool and show him what happens to those who try to outwit Hassouk. Meanwhile, I’ll drink about it, but I won’t do anything hasty, I fear.”

It was a dismissal, and I heard Karana give a little snort. I edged my way backwards along the ledge, found the window I’d come out and tumbled back into the building. I hurried back to my quarters through silent corridors, my mind racing.

Why was she so determined to get rid of me? I was certain that I had satisfied her as no one else ever had, perhaps for the only times in her life. In fact, I’d thought that might give me a kind of hold on her. Instead, she wanted me dead. It didn’t figure, to say nothing of being hard on the ego. I was still wondering about it, finishing dressing, when she entered my quarters.

“Come with me, please,” she said. She turned abruptly, but I caught her shoulder and at once she began to tremble. She pulled away from me. “Please,” she said. “This way.”

“Don’t tell me you’re disappointed,” I said to that serene, beautiful profile. She turned, her eyes dark and fearful, holding mine. But she said nothing, controlling herself with visible effort, as I followed her into a square room almost entirely filled by a swimming pool.

“The two girls who will come in here in a moment,” Karana began, “have been plotting to escape. Word of it has reached us.”

“Something went wrong with your brain-control technique?” I asked dryly.

“Obviously,” she said, “nothing is perfect. The system we will use on them is the same one we use on those girls we bring back who are of no further use to us.”

Further talk was cut off as the door opened and the two girls appeared, wearing filmy shifts. Karana ordered them to strip and go into the water. They looked at me curiously and obediently followed her instructions. The water looked inviting, the square pool incongruously similar to a college natatorium.

Karana had walked over to where a series of levers jutted from the near wall. She pulled down hard on one of the levers. I watched, waiting, and saw nothing unusual. The two girls swam lazily in the center of the pool. Then, on the far side, I saw a swirl of water which indicated the sudden arrival of new water, rushing in to mingle with what was already there. Then I saw the dark shapes, two, three, four, five of them. Huge sea turtles, over five-hundred pounds each.

In the pool, the girls had suddenly become aware of the underwater monsters. They screamed and struck out for the side of the pool. But Karana had drawn out the ladder they’d entered by and the sides of the pool were too high to clamber out without one.

I knew what such giant sea turtles could do, knew the strength in their fantastic jaws. The common giant snapping turtle of the woodland lakes can snap a broomstick like a straw. These giants could crush a thigh bone like cotton candy.

“They have not been fed in weeks,” Karana said calmly. “They are ravenous.”

The turtles, while slow and cumbersome on land, were fast as lightning in their natural element. I watched them converge on the helpless swimmers. I saw one girl seized by a huge turtle, saw her leg severed with one bite as she screamed. Another giant leatherback came at her from the other side and clamped down on her shoulder. Her scream was lost beneath the water as he pulled her under. In seconds, the water was red as the huge turtles dived in for successive bites, literally tearing their victims apart.

“We use the turtles because they devour everything,” Karana said matter-of-factly. “Unlike some fish who are only flesh-eaters, they leave nothing to clean up. Of course, when they’re finished here we’ll still have to feed them. This is only a snack to them.”

The water now was almost opaque with reddened foam. Karana walked to the levers, pulled the second one and the bloody water began to drain out of the pool. Finally it was empty, except for the turtles lying on the smooth bottom. They had, as Karana said, left nothing to clean up. Pulling a third lever, she flushed drainage water into the pool to finish cleaning it. Still another lever sent fresh water cascading down into the pool.

“Normally we let them walk back into the secondary pool where they’re kept,” Karana said, and I noticed the open door to the adjoining pool, now also filling up with fresh water. “However, I have something else to show you.”

The pool filled quickly, and in a matter of minutes the giant turtles were swimming about again, looking for more food.

“Watch them closely,” Karana said, and I stood at the edge of the pool peering in, marveling at how smoothly the giant reptiles could swim. I knew Karana was beside me but I never, in my wildest imaginings, would have figured her for what she did next.

She hit me, with full force, her shoulder going into the small of my back, and I felt myself falling, going over into the pool. As I hit the water, a mingled feeling of fury, surprise and, strangely enough, disbelief swept over me. But I also reacted with a kind of instant self-survival mechanism.

I dived to the bottom of the pool, swam to the farthest corner and came up for air. It would take the monsters a moment or so to zero in on me, I knew, to detect the presence of another victim. I dove again and swam to the bottom of the pool. Now I saw two of them begin to make fast, sideways motions, starting to whirl in the water, the sign that they had realized my presence nearby.

I dropped Hugo into the palm of my hand, clasping my fingers tight around the hilt of the stiletto. Waiting for the turtles to come to me would be fatal; there’d be no dodging the speed of those darting bodies and I’d be shredded in minutes. I came up under the lead leatherback and drove the stiletto deep into the underside of his throat, drawing it down to carve a long line into his neck. Blood spurted into the water and immediately the other turtles came darting in. They came on in quick, biting spurts to attack the wounded one in the blood-frenzy common to much undersea life. As they were devouring the leatherback, I came up under one of them and plunged Hugo into almost the same spot on him.

Two went after him now, and the surface of the water was again darkened by a red stain. I swam beneath it and dove to the bottom, swimming fast through the still open underwater door to the secondary pool. I surfaced there, and saw I could climb out easily. Cages suspended in the water held more of the huge turtles. Out of the pool now, I saw the closed door leading to the main pool. I opened it silently and looked out. Karana was moving anxiously along the edge of the pool, peering into the blood-stained water, trying to see below the red film on the top. I stepped out into the pool area.

“Looking for someone?” I said.

She whirled, eyes wide with disbelief, but she put two and two together in an instant.

“The door to the secondary pool,” she breathed.

“Right,” I said. “You were in too much of a hurry to get rid of me.” I walked toward her, and she backed away until she stood at the edge of the pool. “Why, damn you, why?” I yelled at her.

“You made me feel,” she gasped. “You made me reach a climax. No one else ever did. Once more, and I knew I’d have to go to you again. I would be your slave, forever in your bondage, trapped by something beyond my control. Not for me. Never.”

So that explained the fear in her eyes, the hatred. I had made her vulnerable, human, and she couldn’t permit that. To be never satisfied by a man had been her protection, and I had destroyed that. She was warped, twisted, like Hassouk.

“How were you going to explain my accident?” I asked.

“I was going to tell him you broke down and tried to rescue the girls,” she answered. I smiled. I had suddenly realized that perhaps two could play the slave game.

“But I’m here, alive, Karana,” I said, advancing on her. I tore off my shirt and pulled at my pants. “And I’m going to do just what you were afraid of, Karana. I’m going to turn the tables on you. You will be a slave to my slightest whim. Look at me, Karana. You are lost now, like all the others here, but lost to me, to what I can do to you.”

Her eyes, burning with desire and fear again, looked at me. Her lips parted and she started to dive forward toward me. I saw her foot slip out from under her, her leg hit the edge of the pool, and she twisted and toppled backwards. I lunged for her, but her fingertips brushed mine and were gone. She screamed as she hit the water, and I threw myself down and reached out a hand for her. But she had landed right in the middle of the three surviving giant turtles. They grabbed her, tore into her, and I looked away. Poor Karana. The beautiful mistress of a fantastic slave market deathly afraid to be a slave.

Hassouk questioned me, of course, when I went to him. But I told him the truth, part of it anyway. That Karana had tried to get rid of me, and shocked to see me alive, had lost her balance and fallen into the pool. Hassouk actually seemed more annoyed than sad, or anything else. The huge fat built had no feelings beyond the purely physical.

“We’ll have to hurry along your training, Carter,” he said. “You may be needed more than I expected soon.”

Tomas had stood impassively watching me while I explained about Karana, and I could see the disbelief in his eyes. I smiled at him and hoped he could read the promise in my own eyes.

I had a little free time, and I found my way carefully to Karana’s quarters, hoping there might be something revealing there. She had one huge opulent bedroom with closets filled with clothes. I was about to leave when a small bookrack, half-hidden behind a curtain, caught my eye. The books were mostly technical volumes: Freud, the Kreminsha Papers on Brain Patterns, the Psychology of Discipline by Denova, Pavlov, and a very old volume called “Slave Trading in Ancient Arabia.” As I thumbed through it, I glimpsed an underlined paragraph and turned back to it.

“The ancient slave trade was a weapon,” I read. “The powerful Sultans used it extensively to control the Princes, Potentates and Sheiks. By keeping them supplied with slave girls, they were assured of their loyalty.”

I put the book down, feeling like a man who’s found a key but doesn’t know where it fits. The ancient sultans controlled their princes and desert sheiks through the slave trade. I had some idea who Hassouk was controlling, in a general way, but — why? I had the key, now all I had to do was find the keyhole. That and get hard evidence. And time was running out, not so much for me but for Judy.

I’d visited her in the dungeon and seen her limp against the wall, her eyes dulled and glazed with pain. In another day or two, they’d be transferring her to the brain-control laboratory. There she’d be injured beyond repair. There she’d become one of the irreparably lost ones with the cool distant eyes, psychologically and emotionally warped beyond recall. I felt the walls maddeningly closing in on me.

It was a little later that day that I thought I had a break, only to see it dissolve and slip away. I’d been called by Hassouk. When I reached his quarters he was in the outer living room, talking to Tomas. The bald eunuch eyed me warily.

“Two things have happened almost at once,” Hassouk said. “Princess Nancy is bringing us a new set of girls. I need them. I am getting more and more clients. And at the same time, Sheik Al Nassan, an old desert chief and a steady supplier of ordinary slaves, has sent word he has a shipment for us.”

“Who is Princess Nancy?” I asked.

Hassouk turned that aside brusquely. “For the moment, that is no concern of yours,” he said. “Tomas and I will meet Princess Nancy and get the girls. You will meet with Al Nassan and bargain with him for his slaves. One of my eunuchs, who knows the way, will go with you. Al Nassan’s girls and men will be ordinary, with perhaps one outstanding one. You are to purchase them for the lowest possible price, yet leave Al Nassan a satisfied supplier for future use. It will be a test of your abilities in this area, Carter.”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised.

“You will leave at once, by camel, and go into the desert at the edge of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter. My man will show you. At the third oasis, with the olive grove, you will meet Al Nassan and do your bargaining.”

The fat, oily vulture sat there, fingering a jade pendant. He was pleased with himself. I was being sent safely out into the field while this Princess Nancy delivered her “merchandise.” My mind raced. If I could nail Princess Nancy with the girls, I’d have the kind of evidence I needed, damning evidence, imprisoned girls willing to talk. But I was being shipped out. Neat, but perhaps not so neat, I thought.

Like Karana who’d left the door to the secondary pool open, perhaps Hassouk was leaving a door open too. My mind was already hatching a wild, bizarre plan. There was only a thousand to one chance that it would work. But from where I stood, those odds were better than anything else around.

Chapter 8

The sun and the sand had begun to melt together into one vast trackless, relentless, silent enemy by the second day. I’d been given surplus British army khaki and a sun helmet. The eunuch wore his robe, and we had two pack camels besides the ones we rode. I was grateful that I’d learned to ride camels years ago and could relax with the rockingchairlike motion of the great beasts. We were actually making good time, since I’d insisted on traveling almost constantly.

I was more than grateful when we sighted the third oasis with the olive grove. Al Nassan and his men were there already, their tents spread out, their camels, gaunt, hard-ridden beasts, resting. I’d been making plans while we crossed the baking sand and, if my hopes were fulfilled, if my guess was right, then Judy had a chance, a miserable, thin chance, but still a chance.

Al Nassan’s men gathered as we arrived, an evil looking lot of cutthroats, their assorted daggers, pistols and swords making up a small arsenal. Hassouk had given me credentials, and I had them ready as I swung from the camel and approached Al Nassan’s tent.

The sheik emerged, a tall, gaunt old man, gold teeth amid empty spaces, eyes as shifty and crafty as a weasels, a face limned with lines of cunning. I couldn’t even begin to guess his age, but I knew that his body would still be strong, powerful and his mind steeped in the art of bargaining. He didn’t know it, but we were actually going to be bargaining for different things.

He examined my credentials. We exchanged bows and began the formalistic pre-bargaining rituals so dear to the Arabs. The night was spent in feasting on lamb and rice, with side dishes of salad, eggplant and custard. Sheets of flat bread were folded beside the meat and there were olives, of course, and dates. Coffee, flavored with ginger root and cardamom, finished off the meal, and the sheik regaled me with flattering descriptions of his human merchandise in between toasts to my health.

The desert stars were out when the meal ended, and the night had turned cool. Al Nassan walked to my tent with me, and we both knew that in the morning the real bargaining would begin. As he spoke of his long association with Ibn Hassouk, I saw an opening and threw my first pitch.

“Princess Nancy delivers more girls to the house of Hassouk this week,” I said casually, but my eyes watched his cunning, sharp face. By his smile, I had the first, all-important part of my answer. He knew about Princess Nancy. The turn of his lips and a fleeting expression in his eyes revealed that much. I was beginning to feel excited. If he hadn’t known, my trip would have been wasted. But this was the door Hassouk had left open, the old sheik’s long history in the slave market. I figured he would know about this Princess Nancy and how and where to reach her. But going through the door had to wait till morning.

I bid the old sheik good night and went into my tent where Hassouk’s eunuch already lay asleep in his robes. The night passed quickly, and I slept well, awakening to the heat of the blazing morning sun. After washing with water that had kept surprisingly cool inside the thick goatskin waterbags of the sheik’s caravan, I entered Al Nassan’s tent to see his wares. There were twelve females, eleven of them most ordinary but young enough and strong enough. With each one the old fox had something to say. This one had a history of family devotion and loyalty. That one could work like ten camels. This one’s mother bore six sons, therefore male children were in her blood. And so on down the line. He saved his chief attraction for the last, a young girl, not unattractive, and in need of about ten additional pounds.

“She is a virgin,” the sheik announced in hushed tones. “A virgin! She would command a fantastic price anywhere. I am giving my old friend Ibn Hassouk first chance to purchase her. A virgin, especially a young and pretty one like this, is worth twenty times the price of an ordinary girl. This is an absolute fact.”

I shook my head in solemn agreement, and then I tossed out my second curve. “I have my own bargaining methods,” I said. “I will not bargain where there are other ears to listen. When I bargain, there must be only you, me and the slaves.”

“My men will stay far from the tent,” Al Nassan said, but I shook my head. “There are always ears to listen and tell tales. Send your men away. Let them bring back a desert antelope so we may celebrate our bargain tonight. Otherwise, I will go back alone.”

Al Nassan shrugged. After all, I was the buyer and why not humor me? I walked out of the tent with him, watched him go to where his men clustered about the camels. When I saw the men start to mount, I motioned for Hassouk’s eunuch to come with me to our tent. I went in ahead of him. As he entered, I struck out with a side-arm chop that caught him in the neck. He dropped like a stone and I tossed him into a corner. He didn’t really need tying up. Just the same, I used his robes to bind and gag him. You learn only to take those chances you can’t help taking.

When I returned to Al Nassan’s tent, I ordered him to remove all the slaves except the virgin.

“We will start with her as she is the most valuable,” I said. “I will set you a good price for her, if you tell me all you know about Princess Nancy.”

The old man’s eyes glittered and his normally cautious attitude immediately asserted itself. But I had expected as much.

“You do not know of Princess Nancy?” he said slowly. “Ibn Hassouk has not seen fit to tell you? I cannot speak of her then.”

“I’ll agree to your price, old man, for the virgin,” I said. “Tell me about this Princess Nancy.”

Al Nassan was starting to beat a wary retreat. “I do not like the smell of this,” he said. “If I told you that which your master does not wish to tell you, Ibn Hassouk would have me skinned alive.”

“Enough of woman’s talk,” I said angrily. “I want to know all you can tell me.”

Al Nassan got to his feet with a quick, lithe motion, and one hand clasped the gold hilt of the dagger at his waist. “Perhaps Ibn Hassouk has not even sent you,” he said.

I’d hoped that an easy price for the virgin would overcome his fears, but I saw I was wrong The power of Ibn Hassouk reached far from his own pudgy hands.

“Hassouk sent me, but I am my own master,” I growled. “Tell me what I ask, or I’ll set your bones to dry in the desert sun.”

His reaction was typical. Alarmed, confused, he knew only to strike out, to attack. I saw his hand tighten on the dagger, start to draw it from its sheath; then I was on him, moving in with quick, sharp strokes to the neck. He crouched, staggered backwards and I brought him down, out cold, with a short right chop. I tore off bits of his robe and tied him securely.

He came to just as I was finishing the job. He cursed me in pungent Arabic. I propped him against a pile of saddle blankets and walked over to the girl. Removing the simple, one-piece garment she had on, I looked at her naked body, almost boyish but still very feminine — small breasts, narrow hips — appealing in its pubescent, virginal way. Hands bound behind her back at the wrists, her small breasts were thrust out invitingly. I touched them and found them very soft. I shot a glance at the sheik. His eyes narrowed apprehensively.

“Take your hands away from her,” he shouted. I grinned at him, lifted the girl up and put her down on the carpet covering the sand.

“Tell me what you know about Princess Nancy, or I shall deflower this lovely little pheasant,” I said.

Al Nassan screamed, “Leave her alone!”

I played with the girl’s breasts and her deep eyes watched me, unafraid, and I wondered if perhaps she welcomed the idea. I started to move down upon her. The sheik let out a roar of anguish.

“You will ruin me!” he screamed. “I beg you. I am a poor man. She is my one chance for a comfortable old age.”

“You are a cunning old liar,” I said. “Princess Nancy, old man, or in minutes her price will go down ten thousand per cent.”

“Ibn Hassouk would have me slain!” he screamed. “I may as well take my own life now.”

I shrugged and moved down on the girl. Her slim legs half-wrapped themselves around my back. “Watch, old man,” I said. “Watch!”

“All right, all right! Stop! I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he cried. “Leave her alone.”

I drew back, and the girl closed her legs. I got up and faced the old sheik; the beads of perspiration on his face didn’t come from the heat of the morning.

“Princess Nancy is a ship,” he said sullenly “Oh, may Allah help me through the days to come and hide me from the wrath of Ibn Hassouk.”

“A ship?” I echoed. “Where does the ship come from?”

“The Princess Nancy travels up the Red Sea, from the Gulf of Aden, to the private landing of Ibn Hassouk just below Jidda.”

A slave ship! I whistled softly through my teeth. My mind raced. It was the perfect thing, the damning piece of evidence I sought. The human cargo — more girls Hassouk had said — would be captive but not under Hassouk’s control. Their stories would be absolute, crucifying evidence.

I wanted to learn more, if indeed the old sheik knew any more, but I caught the soft sound of camels charging across the sand. I ran to the entrance of the tent, and saw Al Nassan’s men sweeping toward the oasis. I cast a last glance at the sheik and the wide-eyed young girl, grinned at them, and streaked for my camel resting in the shade of an olive tree. I was galloping the beast across the sands, westward toward the Red Sea, when the others swept into camp, but I knew they’d be after me in minutes. My camel was rested and watered. Theirs would be tired from hunting, and they’d not be catching up with me soon.

The map of the area flashed into my mind and I saw that the nearest port would be directly west in a straight line, the small port of Hali. I could learn there whether a ship named the Princess Nancy had come through on her way north. Looking back, I saw a cloud of white-hot sand rising and then small, galloping black shapes cresting a dune. Al Nassau’s men had taken up pursuit, with the old sheik leading them, no doubt.

“Gurragh! Gurragh!” I screamed at the camel and kicked him hard. He increased his speed, but I realized a flaw in my thinking. The beast was indeed more rested, but his breathing was already labored. From the stables of Ibn Hassouk, he was well fed, in condition for leisurely trips, but he was not up to the hard-galloping, steady, high-speed pace of the camels belonging to desert tribesmen.

The black specks were growing steadily larger behind me and my beast was slowing down fast. In this trackless wasteland of sand and more sand, there was no place to hide. Even the dunes were only slight rises, unlike the huge ones of the Sahara. And then I saw it, a wide, tan, swirling cloud on the horizon, quickly growing larger, sending off glints of fire as the sun caught the airborne particles of sand.

It was a sandstorm, millions of bits of sand swept aloft by the simoom, the whirlwind of the Arabian desert. I glanced back and saw my pursuers, now recognizable shapes, gaining on me with amazing speed. The simoom carrying the sandstorm was to the north, a huge one, but I could avoid it by holding to my course. But the camel’s wind was going fast and Al Nassan’s men would have me soon.

I turned and sent my beast, bellowing and protesting, galloping north. The huge cloud turned from silvery tan to black as we neared it, and I saw the others following. I could imagine their disbelief and consternation. Before we hit the edge of the towering sandstorm, I tore my shirt free and wrapped it completely around my head, leaving only slits to see through. Urging the camel on, I plunged into the storm.

A million stinging needles of sand slammed into me, and I howled with pain. I leaped from the camel and we stood for a moment engulfed in blackness, pounded by howling wind. I was breathing only because I breathed beneath my shirt. Without it, my mouth would have been choked with sand, my face torn by the sharp grains. I yanked at the camel, and she needed no urging. Turning her back to the center of the storm, she lay down on the sand, her long neck curled back to hide her head behind the protection of her hump.

I lay down beside the mass of sweat-stained fur, grateful for its bulk, and buried my face into the side of the beast. If Al Nassan’s men had followed us in, they could never find us in this black whirlpool of sand. But it was unlikely they had ridden into the storm. The old sheik would not throw good money after bad. He was a practical man, and he still had his virgin. He could always concoct some story for Ibn Hassouk, if he had to.

I lay there beside the camel and stinging, wind-whipped sand tore through my clothes, through the shirt covering my head so my face was caked with the stuff. The camel had closed its long-lashed eyes and overhanging lips and could weather the storm. I lay there and lost all track of time as the simoom howled, piling sand around my body. I shook it off, moved to another spot beside the beast, and settled down again.

Time stood still. The world had been obliterated. There was nothing but stinging sand, infiltrating sand, needle-sharp sand that left my body with a thousand little cuts. And then, when it seemed my hide could stand no more, came a whisper of hope. The stinging-pounding grew less severe and then ceased. Though the sand still whirled it was no longer a thing of total fury.

A haze of yellow light infiltrated the simoom as the sun fought its way through the swirling sand. I struggled to my feet, heavy with sand, my clothes caked. I yanked on the reins, and the camel began to unfold itself, shaking its massive bulk, starting to rise in its usual fashion, like a child’s balloon filling with air and taking shape in unexpected directions. Holding the reins, I walked out into the glare of the sun as the simoom whirled on its way, once again a glinting, silvery cloud on the horizon. I looked back and saw only a clear expanse of trackless sand. Al Nassan and his men had gone.

I stripped and shook out every bit of clothing. Patting myself free of the clinging sand, I finally dressed again. My body stung with the sandstorm’s pins and needles cuts, and I knew it would hurt for quite a while. I mounted the camel and we turned westward again, toward the Red Sea and a date with a princess.

Chapter 9

It seemed like eternity until I managed to cross the sands, find my way through the passes of the coastal mountains of Jabal Hijaz and finally reach the port of Hali.

It was not much more than a collection of fishing boats, with a stray private yacht and a few tourist launches. It was night when I arrived, and I tied the camel up beside the house of a man whose sign proclaimed that he was a pottery maker. In the morning, when no one came to claim the animal, he would undoubtedly conclude that Allah had smiled on him.

Crossing the desert, in the hot sun, Judy had been uppermost in my thoughts, and I hoped that time was still with her. Now, in the cool night, peering out at the vessels tied at the docks, I concentrated on the slave ship. I saw nothing named the Princess Nancy, nothing that even looked as though it might be a slave ship. Was I too late? It was a grim thought I refused to give more than a moment’s life.

Then, out beyond the line of the port I saw a ship, not more than a black outline, traveling silently, without running lights. That alone was suspicious. The hulk was moving slowly, very slowly. I ran out to the end of a pier where a half-dozen feluccas, the high-prowed Arab sailing craft, were tied. I untied one, raised the slightly conical sail, and the night wind sent the little craft smartly heeling to the port side.

Silently I sailed the felucca out toward the slow moving black hulk. Was it the Princess Nancy and, if so, should I head back for shore and alert the authorities. The answer to that leaped, starkly horrible, into my mind as I recalled the classic reaction of the ancient slave ship captains when they thought they were in danger of discovery. They jettisoned their human cargo. I knew these modern counterparts would be no less ruthless.

Grateful for the silence of the sails, I steered the felucca to a point directly astern of the mystery ship. As I drew closer I could see she was a coastal freighter of some 1500 tons, an old, rusted, battered veteran. Propelled by the night wind my little craft moved much faster than the freighter, and I steered close under the vessel’s transom. Slowly the worn, peeling letters fashioned themselves into readable shape: “Princess Nancy — Alexandria.” It was a helluva name for the old tub; even in the dark I could see the telltale bulge of her side plates. It was no wonder she moved so slowly. Her captain was no doubt trying to coax a few more trips out of her.

I sailed the felucca close against the portside where, in predictably sloppy fashion, the boarding ladder still hung. Reaching out, I got one hand on the ladder and pulled myself up, giving the little boat’s tiller a kick as I did. The felucca turned and sailed off into the night as I clung to the ladder on the side of the Princess Nancy.

Moving up carefully, I peered over the side of the rail. There was no one on deck, and I climbed over the ledge and dropped to the deckboards. The ship was manned by no more than a skeleton crew, I was certain, perhaps not more than half a dozen men plus the skipper. The crew’s quarters would be forward, just below decks.

I crept forward, staying close to the side of the deckhouse, finally slipping inside through a doorway just below the pilothouse. The heavy throb of the straining old engine made the vessel shudder, and I made my way along the inside passageway, looking for signs of the vessel’s human cargo. There were none, only a succession of empty cabins, closets and storage rooms.

I paused at the crew’s quarters and heard the snores from inside. I counted seven shapes in the bunks and moved on to the forward cargo hatch. It was too black to see down into the hatch, but I listened for any sound of human life. There was only silence.

Cautiously I made my way back to the stern of the ship to the aft cargo hatch. A hint of dawn lightened the sky and gave just enough light to see into the hatchway. The hold was empty except for a few boxes and barrels.

But the dawn told me I had to move fast. The crew would be waking, and I had only a few minutes to cut down the odds. A length of stout laundry line lay just inside the passageway door. I scooped it up, cutting it into short, effective lengths with Hugo as I hurried back to the crew’s quarters.

A silent shadow, I slipped inside. The first, nearest bunk was occupied by a beefy Negro. My hand gripped his neck and pressed, fingers digging hard into the pressure points behind the ears. The harsh breathing of sleep turned into the soft breathing of unconscious. I tied him quickly and went on to the next man.

I had only two more to go when one of them suddenly sat up, perhaps awakened by a sixth sense. He was half-Chinese, powerfully built, with a short body. His reaction was swift when he saw me. He came swinging out of the bunk feet first, aiming a kick at me. I ducked away and saw that the last man, a dark-skinned East Indian, was awake now too.

The half-caste Chinese, wearing only trousers, dived for me. I met the dive with a sharp uppercut that sent him back hard against the edge of one of the double bunks. I followed up the uppercut with a left hook that banged his head against the bunk again. He tried to duck away and come at me head down, bull-like. I clubbed him on the back of the neck as he came in, and he dropped at my feet and lay still.

I looked up, just in time to see the East Indian disappearing out the doorway. I ran after him, but he’d already reached the deck and was shouting up to the pilothouse where the helmsman stood. I brought him down with a flying tackle on the deck as, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the pilothouse door open and the helmsman start to emerge.

The East Indian, while a small man, was slippery as an eel and desperate. He got one knee up against my chest and pushed me back, away from him, breaking the hold I had. I ducked away from his other leg that shot a kick at my face, made a grab for the leg but it was out of reach.

A heavy wooden slop bucket stood against the cabin. He grabbed it by the handle and brought it around in a vicious swing. I had to drop to my face on the deck to avoid a bashed-in head as the heavy bucket whistled by. Having missed, the East Indian elected to run, which was a mistake. I dived forward and slammed into him as he tried for the ship’s rail. He went sprawling and I heard the dull cracking sound as his head struck the cleat. I knew he wouldn’t need tying up, and I whirled to see the helmsman, gun in hand, just coming down the ladder.

His shot slammed into the wood less than an inch from my head, and I fell backwards to the deck, rolled over and came up with Wilhelmina, blazing off two fast shots. The first missed, the second caught him. He catapulted backwards as the heavy 9 mm slug tore into him.

I heard the sound of a door slamming, and I knew who it would be. I looked up at the captain’s cabin and saw the man, hair uncombed, a small moustache, the blue captain’s coat with the gold bars thrown over his bare chest. He took one look at me, at the gun in my hand and withdrew from the rail. I heard him racing along the upper deck, took after him, and we met as he descended the ladder just aft of the ship’s funnel.

“Don’t shoot,” he said. He had a thick Turkish accent. I walked over to him grimly. His deep-set eyes tried to meet mine in a show of boldness.

“This ship has nothing of value aboard,” he said. “Search the cargo holds. They are practically empty.”

“Where are the girls?” I asked.

His eyes flickered for an instant, and then he frowned quickly. “What are you talking about?”

I slammed him across the face with Wilhelmina, and he went sprawling on the deck, blood spurting from his lip. My patience was at an end and I was out of time. I picked him up.

“Your human cargo, you miserable excuse for a shin’s skipper,” I snarled. “Where are the slaves?”

Once more he started to protest but I cut him off with a blow to his gut that doubled him up, I followed that with a right that sent him rolling across the deck.

“I’ll break you into little pieces bit by bit,” I snarled at him, pulling him to his feet. “You slimy, scurvy bilge rat.” He saw the fury in my face and realized I meant what I said. The attempt to bluff his way through collapsed; he deflated like a punctured tire.

“A false deck,” he muttered hoarsely. “Below the bridge.” I glanced back and up at the ship’s bridge. It wasn’t very deep or wide.

“Show me,” I said. “Move!” I prodded him with Wilhelmina, and he led the way up the ladder and along the upper deck to the bridge. He went to the outside curved deck of the bridge and, kneeling in one corner, began to lift up the deck-boards, using the end of a crowbar that was lying nearby. I watched him carefully and when he had a quarter of the bridge deck taken up, I moved forward.

“Put down the crowbar and stand back,” I ordered.

As he obeyed, I walked to the edge of the deck and peered down into the space where the deck-boards had been. My jaw tightened in anger. The girls, gagged and bound, bad been placed one atop the other in double rows on a false deck a few feet below the real deck. Between the bridge and the false deck, I estimated, was about six inches of air space.

“Take up the rest of the deckboards, you bastard,” I snarled at the Turk. “And make it fast.”

I watched, keeping the Luger on the man as he worked, until finally he had the entire bridge torn up, and I looked down at the two rows of women, all bound and gagged. There were fifteen to twenty in all.

“Lift them out, one by one,” I ordered. “And untie each girl as you bring her out.”

I was standing almost inside the glass-enclosed part of the bridge, keeping one eye on the wheel which the helmsman had lashed down when he’d come after me. The course was straight ahead and there were no other craft in sight, so I let the wheel remain as it was. The girls, as they emerged, shaken, frightened, were still in the clothes they’d worn when abducted, some in mini dresses, some in blouses and skirts.

“Tie him up,” I said to one girl, who was obviously a European. “Do you understand English?” She nodded and, using the same ropes with which she had been tied, bound the captain. The girls had crowded into the wheelhouse now, and they eyed me warily.

“I’m not one of them,” I announced. “I’m here to see that you’re set free. How many of you understand English?” There were five or six who responded, and I singled out a girl who turned out to be Irish. Quickly she told me how she had met with a representative of Tour-Guide Trips while in Greece. He was interviewing girls who responded to an ad placed in an Athens newspaper.

The others had similar stories of phony interviews, then a private meeting and then finding themselves imprisoned, most often after being drugged. There were six Europeans, four Africans, three South Americans, four Chinese and three Scandinavians. Most spoke a little English and among them shared enough languages so that they could maintain a running translation for each other as I briefly told them what would have been in store for them if they’d reached Hassouk’s private landing.

Once freed, their fright and shock and helplessness had quickly worn off. Now a hot anger took over. I could feel the anger grow as I told them all I knew about Hassouk’s operation. A crazy plan started to shape up in my mind. These girls were not sheltered wallflowers; they were girls who had been around. Some of them came from coastal towns, seaports, places where you learned to handle boats when you learned to walk — the coast of Ireland, the Greek islands, the African shore.

“How many of you can sail a ship?” I asked, and there was a small forest of hands.

“How many of you could handle the engine room of this old tub?” A couple of hands waved.

“My father and my brothers had a small fleet of motor sailors off the Hebrides,” a girl called out. “The engine on this ship is running now. It ought to be no trouble to keep it going.”

I found myself grinning. I had a crew of allies as well as evidence.

“How many of you can handle a gun?” I asked. There were a couple of hands at that, too. It would work I saw, with mounting excitement. The old tub only needed a handful of crew to run her, actually.

“Listen to me, all of you,” I said. “We can work together and get Ibn Hassouk. Are you game?”

Their answering shout was no real surprise to me.

“All right, here’s my plan,” I said. “Hassouk expects this miserable tub to dock at his private landing within a few hours. If it doesn’t show, he’ll suspect trouble immediately. He’ll kill all the girls he now holds at his place and take off. I can’t let that happen. I want Hassouk in jail or dead, either place, but where he can never make trouble again. The ship’s crew is tied up below. There’ll be enough men’s jackets or shirts to put on, and I know we’ll find a fair-sized collection of guns on board. You’ll sail the Princess Nancy right up to Hassouk’s dock. When he and his men come out to meet you, open fire on them. Shoot to kill, get all of them you can. Then back off and stay offshore in mid-river until you hear from me. That will give me time to get into his place, save those I can still save and get the rest of the evidence I need on Hassouk.”

I paused and looked at them. “Think you can handle it?” I asked.

They fell over each other assuring me they not only could but would. It could work. Hassouk’s men would be taken completely by surprise. And this would not be the first rag-tag, hastily assembled little army of determined fighters to come out on top. The pages of history were filled with them. I gave a short prayer to history and hoped it would repeat itself.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get started. While you’re doing your part, I’ve got to do mine.”

I put one of the girls in charge, a big blonde Greek. A little French girl took the wheel and an Indonesian-Chinese girl acted as lookout and navigator for her. Two Greek girls went down to look at the engine room. In less than half an hour the deck boards had been replaced on the bridge, but this time the crew and the captain were underneath, lying on the false deck. Rifles were found, ten carbines, plus an assortment of revolvers in a metal locker in the captain’s cabin. The two dead men were unceremoniously tossed overboard.

I decided I’d make Hassouk’s place faster on shore. So I bundled my clothes up inside an oilskin bag I found, stripped down to my shorts and went to the ship’s rail. I took a last look back at the new crew of the Princess Nancy. Some of the girls wore rough men’s shirts, others had on short shipboard jackets and dungarees and all wore some kind of cap to hide their hair. They were grimly determined, their jaws set, armed and angry.

It was a short swim to shore. I dried off quickly in the blazing sun, then put on my clothes. Following a dusty shore road, I met an Arab in Western clothes but wearing the traditional red tarboosh on his head, bouncing along in a vintage Ford at least thirty years old, I guessed. I hailed him and he slowed down enough for me to hop in. As I invited no questions, and it was against Arab etiquette to pose uninvited inquiries, we rode along in silence until I saw the familiar tower of the house of Ibn Hassouk.

The road had headed away from shore inland, so I never got the chance to see the private landing. But I knew it had to be fairly close. I thanked my good Samaritan and hopped from the old car as we neared Hassouk’s estate. I was standing under a date tree, thinking about the best way to get inside the grounds, when I saw a parade of two limousines and one truck leave the place and go down the road, turning off to cut across the dirt a few hundred yards away. I’d caught sight of Hassouk’s huge shape in the back seat of the first car. I knew where he was going.

When the convoy was out of sight, I hurried to the gate. I still had the credentials with me which Hassouk had given me to show Al Nassan and I flashed them for the two guards. They nodded and let me through.

Once inside, I raced through the house down the connecting passageway to the second building. I took the steps to the dungeon in two huge leaps and rushed into the cold dank room. Two eunuchs were working over one of the girls as I entered. My eyes swept past them, searching for Judy. When I saw her, still hanging dazedly from the wall, my heart leaped in relief.

The two eunuchs looked up briefly, then, used to seeing me around, returned to their work. I picked up a heavy length of iron pipe lying on the floor, came up behind them and, with one blow, sent them both crashing to the ground. I caught the girl they’d been torturing and lowered her gently to the floor, then I unshackled Judy.

I had intended to get her out and send her back to her place but I saw that that would be impossible. She was too exhausted, too near unconsciousness to function on her own. I put her down gently, unshackled the two other girls in the place and lowered them to the floor too. They’d stay there that way for hours, at least. It was as good a spot for them as any. When things started erupting, Hassouk would have his hands full. He wouldn’t be thinking about the poor creatures in his damnable dungeon. But now was my chance to get into his quarters, into the inner sanctum where I knew the answers I still sought must be.

I raced upstairs and back into the main building. The marble stairs to the second story were easy to take four at a time. I raced into Hassouk’s rooms, through a living room and a bedroom and into a study. Along one wall, I saw a row of file cabinets and below them, in neatly stacked rows, hundreds of the round, metal film containers, each one labeled and carrying a code mark.

I was just reaching out for one of the containers when the sharp sound of a shot split the air. But it wasn’t a shot and I felt the cutting slash open the side of my face, and then a long leather object was wrapping itself around my neck. I was yanked backwards, and as I hit the floor I saw the huge, bald figure standing in the door, holding onto the other end of the bullwhip.

I couldn’t untangle the end of the whip and I had all I could do to keep it pulled far enough from my windpipe to keep from choking to death. Tomas moved toward me with long catlike strides and, bending down, reached inside my khaki jacket and pulled Wilhelmina from her holster. I rolled away in the other direction and felt the whip loosen from around my neck. I heard Tomas snort and turned to see him toss Wilhelmina out the window. He snapped the bullwhip back and sent it slashing out again. I twisted away to take the full force of it on my back. At the same time that I felt the searing, cutting pain, I heard the big eunuch roar out:

“Two-faced jackal! I went to the dungeon and knew at once it had to be you.”

He snapped the whip out again, and again I felt the pain as it cut deep into the back. I grabbed for it but he tore it from my hands and shot it out again and again and again as I tried to avoid its searing, cutting touch. He was an expert with the damned thing, and I knew a bullwhip in expert hands could kill or maim for life.

I tried diving for him but he moved quickly, lightly and brought the whip crashing down on my back, and then again I felt it start to wrap around my neck. I rolled on my back, dropped Hugo into my palm and threw from that position. I saw the stiletto sink into the big eunuch’s abdomen.

He gasped and, dropping the bullwhip, yanked the slender dagger out of his body. He threw it to one side contemptuously. I dived for him and hit him at the knees. He staggered backwards, but his legs were like small oak trees. I let go and dropped to the floor before he could bring his hand down on the back of my neck. I heard the rush of wind as he missed and I got under the blow. I got an arm around one ankle and pulled and he went down, off-balance. But he was on his feet again as quickly as I was back on mine, and another blow whistled past my face as I managed to pull back.

Blood was pouring out of the wound in his abdomen now, but Thomas seemed oblivious to it. I parried his next blows, but I felt the tremendous, bruising force of them on my arms, sledgehammers landing. I ducked another swing and, perfectly positioned, crossed a right to the chin.

It was a picture book blow, delivered with every ounce of my strength. He went toppling backwards, crashing into a small table and, falling down on it, smashing it to bits. It would have broken the jaw of an ordinary man, certainly knocked him out, but the giant eunuch got up, a little more slowly, but still he was on his feet. He was holding a leg of the table he’d just smashed.

He came at me, the table leg in his right hand, his left clutching his abdomen. Hugo’s mark was now taking effect. Tomas swung the table leg, a tremendous blow that would have broken my arm had I tried to parry it. I could only duck away, and duck again as he swung the wooden leg backwards and forwards in sweeping arcs.

Suddenly a fusillade of shots sounded in the distance, and another and another. The giant eunuch halted for a split second, the table leg upraised, listening. The split second was all I needed. I grabbed his arm, twisted in a Judo move, and he went sailing over my head to crash like a fallen tree. The room shook. I picked up the table leg and brought it down viciously across his abdomen. He grabbed at himself with both hands and his face contorted in pain. I brought the table leg down again, but this time in a smashing blow across the back of his neck as he got up on both knees.

He fell forward, gasping in pain. Still holding one hand to his abdomen, he started to push himself up with one huge arm when I brought the table leg down once more on the back of his skull and felt the shattering impact up to my shoulder. He stayed still for a long second, then pitched forward and rolled half-over. He was finished, his staring eyes mute testimony of death.

The firing was still going on and I smiled. The crew of the Princess Nancy was living up to all my hopes. Hassouk’s huge bulk would certainly be among the easiest targets. I stepped over Tomas and went back to the wall cabinet files.

I pulled open a drawer and rifled through the cards, picking out one at random. “Smythe, Josh,” “X-22.” Checking the metal film containers I found the one marked X-22 and pulled it out. Unrolling the film, I saw a man flogging a Chinese girl while an African girl flogged him. All three were nude. Other frames showed the man using a home-medical tube on the Chinese girl. There was more of the same.

I put the container back in place and. picked out another name from the file cabinet: “Remoux, Pierre, French Atomic Energy Mission.” His film number was H-7, and in his container I found a film strip of him with two girls not more than ten or twelve years old. I put it away and began to rifle through the file cards again.

I found names I knew, men from every country, influential men, cabinet ministers, members of parliament, espionage agents, congressmen, men serving in highly critical posts on international agencies, plus a host of lesser names in small governmental positions. The damned thing was a Who’s Who of world governments, of just about every country in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa.

These were the men Hassouk had entrapped, exploited and hooked with his girls, his specialists in erotica. These were the masters who were really slaves, in bondage to Hassouk. With the film taken by his girls and sent to him, he had them all trapped, enslaved. But all for just blackmail? That still didn’t seem to fit right, and I was thinking about it when I heard the screech of tires outside.

I went to the window. It was the truck I’d seen leaving the grounds to go meet the Princess Nancy. The door flew open and the big blond Swedish girl leaped out, followed by two other girls. I yelled down at them, then ran down to meet them.

“You were supposed to back off and anchor offshore,” I said. “What happened?”

“We didn’t need to back off,” the blonde said. “They’re dead or they ran away. We got them all except the big fat one.”

“Hassouk,” I said grimly.

“At the first shot, he got into his car and took off, leaving everyone else there.”

“Dammit!” I said. “You get back to the ship and stay on it until you hear from me. I’m going to try to get him. Give me a lift to the main road.”

I got into the truck and we sped off through the gates. The guards, hearing the shots, had sensed the game was up and fled. The few eunuchs still around could take off, too, for all I cared. They were unimportant fish. But the human barracuda was still loose. I leaped from the truck as we reached the main road, and the girls continued on to the sea.

The road was really jammed with white-garbed pilgrims now. The day of days was but 24 hours away. The pilgrims filled the road, some borne on fitters, some hobbling on crutches, most walking with their fellow pilgrims, a flood of white-garbed humanity caught up in the religious fervor of their faith.

I peered up and down the road, trying to pick out Hassouk’s limousine. If he was trying to get away in this throng, it would be slow going. I walked with the pilgrims toward a little cluster of people and three policemen. A little further on I could see the signs proclaiming MOSLEMS ONLY. The sacred ground at this time was a restricted area, reserved for the faithful, and a petition for the pilgrimage had to be filled with the Qaadi, the religious magistrate.

As I neared the policemen I saw they were standing around a man, naked except for a tiny jock-strap-like cloth. He was telling the officers that someone had pulled him into a doorway and stolen his ihraam, the simple white pilgrim’s garb.

I didn’t wait to hear any more. I didn’t need to. I fought my way to the edge of the road and started running alongside the slowly moving line of pilgrims, all identical in their ihraams, the crowd getting denser as I went along. I passed the MOSLEMS ONLY sign marking a restricted rest area and my eyes scanned the men and women seated on the dry, lifeless grass. I went on running, my throad growing parched in the white-hot heat and the clouds of dust rising from the hundreds of thousands of feet.

A small village came up, a few clay houses on both sides of the main road, the villagers going about their business without regard for the pilgrims. I dodged a black-veiled woman carrying water, small slits for the eyes the only indication that there was a person beneath the outfit. And then I saw him, his fat bulk barely covered by the ihraam, trudging along the far side of the road, taking nervous glances back.

He hadn’t looked in the right direction yet but as I came up alongside him, on the other side of the road, he saw me and stopped. I started to push my way through the throng when his voice boomed out in an angry roar.

“Brothers!” he called. “There is an infidel among us. There is one who desecrates the name of Allah.” He pointed a finger at me and a thousand heads turned. There was a shocked silence that rapidly filled with muttering anger. “There he is!” Hassouk shouted. “A non-believer, a prying infidel from another land who followed me here to mock me. Look at him, without even an ihraam, laughing at our sacred faith.”

The roar erupted like a volcano exploding. I took one look at the instant frenzy Hassouk had brought on and started to run. He had turned these already emotionally overheated pilgrims into an avenging mob. This was no time for denials, explanations or attempted rebuttal. Mobs are mobs, anywhere, anytime, and this one was out to tear me to pieces.

I headed for the houses of the little village, my one advantage that the mob was falling over itself in its angry eagerness to catch me. But they’d be fanning out and they’d take apart every house to find me. Their shouts and screams were a terrifying sound, the sound of raw emotions out of control. I ran through one building, then out another and crossed over into a thud. The third one had a stable and I climbed up into a pile of hay.

I heard running and shouts outside as the mob swept through the village, and I could imagine Hassouk’s satisfied oily smirk as he turned off and started back to his estate. With me hiding from a crazed mob, certain to be found and tom to shreds, he could return and collect all his files and cards and set business somewhere else. It had all been for nothing. He would get away and whatever it was he was doing would go on.

The sound of running drew closer. White-robed figures flashed by the stable door as the mob ran back and forth, starting to go through the houses one by one. Suddenly a robed, black-veiled woman stopped in the doorway, a basket of dates on her head, taking temporary refuge out of the path of the screaming mob.

I lowered myself silently, came up behind her and clapped a hand over her mouth. With one quick motion, I applied pressure behind her ears and dragged her back into the stable. She collapsed, unconscious, and I bound her with the sleeves of my jacket. In less than a minute, a robed, black-veiled figure emerged from the stable, the basket of dates on its head, walking slowly, evenly, in the manner of Arab women, and hoping the damned basket would stay in place.

I threaded my way serenely through the racing mob, managed to get to the side of the road and started back toward Hassouk’s place alongside the throng of pilgrims. I continued my slow, steady pace, fighting down the desire to break and run for it. I didn’t want to start another riot or have the police pick me up. There wasn’t time for the usual question-and-answer routine.

So I kept up my even, gliding gait until I got inside the grounds of Hassouk’s estate. Then the basket went flying as I tore off the veil and robe and raced into the house. I took the marble stairs on the balls of my feet silently. I could hear the faint clank of metal, the film containers being stacked up, and as I walked into the room, Hassouk turned. The giant eunuch was still there, watching us with dead unseeing eyes, and Hassouk still had on his stolen ihraam.

“It’s all over, fatso,” I said, quietly.

“I don’t think so,” he answered, and then I saw the gun. “It may be over for you, Carter, but not for me.” I moved into the room, circling around, but he waved the gun at me.

“That’s far enough,” he said. My back was to the window, and it was about a twenty-foot drop to the grass below. A small table on which he’d piled the metal film containers was within reach, but he had the gun and I was pretty well trapped.

“You are an amazingly slippery customer, I must say,” Hassouk admitted. “I do regret you weren’t unprincipled enough to join me. It would have been worth your while.”

“Blackmail isn’t that exciting,” I said, tossing out the bait. He snapped at it.

“Blackmail?” he said, and his rumbling laugh echoed in the room. “Of course blackmail is part of it, perhaps the key part, but not just for money, my dear fellow.”

“What then?” I asked.

“By now you have glanced through my files and you know the importance of some of my clients,” he said. “They were all carefully chosen, once I learned they had a weakness. With my hold over these men, I can rule the world from behind the scenes, Carter. I can make the world mine. I can make things happen and not happen. I can exert an influence, a silent, hidden influence on every section of government and world affairs. And for every one of the older men, I have younger ones already in bondage to me.”

So that was his warped, twisted plan. The power behind the throne syndrome. He would get his kicks by pulling strings, and no doubt by pulling them so the world would blow itself up, piece by piece. Of course he was mad and of course he could do just what he said, if left to do it. It wouldn’t be that hard. The men he had in his power would make decisions based on fear of him, fear of losing what he had hooked them on, fear of their careers, good names and, in many cases, family ties. So each one, in his own little puddle, would answer his master’s bidding, and the slave market in Arabia would become the slave market of the world.

Hassouk’s eyes had a faraway look for a second, no doubt envisioning his plan in action. I had been merely a temporary interruption. Like hell, fatso. I kicked out, hitting the table leg. The containers tumbled with a loud, sudden clatter. Automatically, Hassouk’s glance swiveled to them and I dived forward, under the gun. It barked; the slug tore along my back and I could feel the warm spurt of blood.

My head slammed into his fat belly and carried us both backwards into the desk. I grappled for his gun arm and got it, just long enough to twist it and send his huge bulk slamming into the wall. I thought he’d drop the gun but he didn’t, and I raced across the room as he shook himself loose from the wall.

I was diving out the window when his second shot rang out, missing me. I did a jackknife somersault and somehow managed to land on my feet. Wilhelmina lay on the grass where Tomas had flung her. I grabbed the Luger, whirled and fired as Hassouk’s huge bulk appeared at the window. I blasted off three shots and they all hit home, right into that larded chest. I saw his mouth open, his jaw slacken and the red stain spread on the stolen white ihraam. He fell forward and lay draped half over the window ledge, quivering, for a moment and then a still, half-naked mountain of flesh.

I slipped Wilhelmina into her holster and realized suddenly that my body hurt from head to toe and that I was very, very tired. I went into the silent house, found a phone and put a call into the American Consulate. Using the AXE code identification, I told them the story in brief, arranged for them to contact Hawk and start the preliminary proceedings.

I heard the sound of cars driving into the grounds, and I went downstairs and outside to see the pick-up truck and one of the limousines spill out the crew of the Princess Nancy, my crew. I told the girls what had happened and they promised to wait there for the Consulate officials to arrive. They would each have then own story to tell. Then I went downstairs and put a robe over a small still-unconscious girl and carried her out. The Swedish girl drove us to Judy’s apartment and went back to wait for the officials.

I bathed Judy in warm water and called a doctor. When he came, I identified myself and gave him as much of the story as he needed to know to treat her. It was late that night, after he’d left, that she woke. I was sitting beside the bed. Her eyes, round, filled with things I couldn’t sort out, stared at me.

“It’s over,” I said quietly. “And I’m sorry for what you had to go through, Judy. I can’t say how sorry I am for that.”

She looked around, orienting herself to the familiar things of her apartment and then she looked at me again. She said nothing, but there was bitterness in her eyes. I got up and, patting her hand, left. The doctor called on her each day and gave me reports, and I had an unexpected visitor within 24 hours, chewing on an unlighted cigar.

“Had to come,” he said. “Controversy over ownership of the films. We straightened it out. Every man in that file has been sent his original print and a letter from AXE.”

“A letter telling them to change their habits, I take it,” I commented.

“That’s implied, of course,” Hawk said. “It really tells them to count their blessings, that thanks to one of our agents, they’ve been made free men again.”

“Just call me Abe Lincoln,” I mumbled.

“Of course the most important men in the most sensitive positions will be watched by their respective governments,” Hawk added. “Medical and psychiatric help will be suggested where it seems necessary.”

Hawk stayed only a day and graciously suggested that I stick around until Judy was a little better. “Take another day or two,” he said, magnanimously. We finally settled on something closer to two weeks.

I was beginning to think it wouldn’t be time enough. All I heard were reports from the doctor and no word from Judy. I was alone late one night in the hotel room I’d taken, with only about three days left of my two weeks, when I answered a knock at the door. She was there, looking up at me with those big, round eyes. She came in, saying nothing, and I looked at her as she stood there in a silk, pink dress, very dainty and very feminine.

“You look great, Judy,” I said. “I’m glad. Very glad.”

“The outside heals,” she said quietly. “The inside takes longer. Sometimes it never heals. I thought it wouldn’t.”

“And has it?” I asked.

“I did a lot of thinking,” she said seriously. “At first, I couldn’t find any reason to forgive you. You’d used me purposely and deliberately. I knew you hadn’t meant for me to go through what I did. You were trapped into that, I could see. But there are people who would have been incapable of letting them take me away like that. They would have thought of me, the person, the human being. But you didn’t and I hated you for that. And then, as I began to get better, I thought more about it, and I began to understand. I think you did think about me, about what they were doing to me.”

“I did, Judy,” I said quietly, taking her hand. “I sure as hell did.”

Content

Nick Carter
The Arab Plague

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9