"He never arrived," I finished for him.
Remy nodded. He turned slightly to avoid having the dancer in his line of vision. I could see why. She was no aid to concentration. She had left the center of the floor and was writhing through the onlookers now, breasts and thighs brushing voluptuously against one eager man, then another.
"He boarded the plane," Remy continued. "We know that. His daughter saw him do so. But he did not go through customs and immigration at Lucerne. In fact, he is not listed as being aboard the plane from Milan to Lucerne."
"So the kidnapping, if it is kidnapping, took place in Milan. Or aboard the plane from Marseilles," I said thoughtfully.
"It would seem so," said Remy. "In any event, his daughter received a letter from him two days later. Both Mademoiselle Duroche and our best handwriting experts agree that it was indeed written by Duroche himself. In the letter Duroche stated that once on the plane, he had been seized by a sudden need for solitude, and had made a spur of the moment decision to isolate himself somewhere to 'think things over. "
"Postmark?" I asked, forcing myself not to look at the dancer. She was getting nearer. Low moans came from her throat now; her torso movements were becoming frantic.
"The postmark on the letter was Rome. But that, of course, means nothing."
"Less than nothing. Whoever kidnapped him could have forced him to write the letter, then mailed it from anywhere they chose." I finished my rum and tea in one easy swallow. "If, that is, he way kidnapped."
"Exactly. Of course, in spite of his brilliant record of patriotism, we must face the possibility that Duroche has defected. If we take the words and tone of his letters at face value, that is most likely."
"There was more than one letter?"
"Three weeks after his disappearance, Michelle Duroche received another letter. In it, again in his handwriting, Duroche stated that he was increasingly disturbed about the nature of the work being done at RENARD, and had decided to spend another six months in solitude to 'think over' whether he wanted to continue. It was only then that his daughter became truly alarmed — he did not state in the letter where he was, or state when he would communicate with her again — and decided it was her duty as an employee of RENARD, as well as his daughter, to contact the authorities. I was brought into the case immediately, but since then our investigations have turned up virtually nothing of value."
"The Russians? The Chinese?" The girl was close to us. I could smell the perfume and the muskiness of her gleaming body. I could see the drops of sweat between her lush breasts. Men were reaching out to touch her, to grab for her.
"All our agents give negative on that," said Remy. "So you see,
mon ami,
we are truly facing a blank wall. We do not know who he is with, whether he is with them of his own will or not and, most important, we do not know where he is. What we
do
know is that with the information within Fernand Duroche's head, project RENARD can be duplicated by anyone, anywhere in the world, for only a few million dollars."
"How deadly is it?"
"Deadly," said Remy somberly. "Not a hydrogen bomb or bacteriological warfare, but in the wrong hands, deadly."
Now the girl was so close I could feel her hot breath on my face. Her moans were becoming guttural, demanding, her pelvis moved back and forth in a frenzy, her arms reaching up as if to the invisible lover who was producing the ecstatic agony in her flesh; then her thighs spread to receive him. More men reached out for her, their eyes blazing with hunger. She eluded them, never losing her concentration on her own inward convulsions.
"And the daughter? Does she think it possible that Duroche might
really
have gone off alone to 'think things over'?"
"You will speak to the daughter yourself," said Remy. "She is in hiding, and I will bring you to her. That is one reason,
mon ami,
I have asked you to come here to Tangier. Another reason, and the reason I have involved you and AXE, is a suspicion I have. Call it, how do you say, a hunch. But who could best have infiltrated project RENARD, become aware of what it was and how it could be used — then kidnap Dr. Duroche, or encourage him to defect? Who…"
I leaned closer, straining to hear Remy's words. The music was screaming harshly as the girl in front of us, her mouth open in a silent scream of ecstasy, began to arch her body toward one final spasm. From the corner of my eye, I could see two men moving purposefully across the room. Bouncers? To keep the onlookers in control and prevent the scene from becoming one of mass rape? I eyed them warily.
"…old friends again — agent's report — the volcano…" Disconnected snatches of Remy's talk came across to me. Watching the two men move closer, I reached over and put my hand on his arm. Inches away, the girl's body quivered, then, at last, convulsed.
"Remy," I said, "keep your eye on…"
He started to turn. At that moment, both men whipped aside their
djellabas.
"Remy!" I shouted. "Down!"
It was too late. In the low-ceilinged room, the brutal chatter of Sten guns was deafening. Remy's body slammed forward as if he had been smashed in the spine with a gigantic hammer. A line of bloody holes appeared along his back as if they had been tattooed there. His head exploded. The skull splintered into an eruption of red blood, gray brains, and white slivers of bone. Instantly, my face was soaked with his blood, my hands and shirt splattered.
There was nothing I could do for Remy now. And I didn't have time to mourn him. A split second after the first bullets hit, I had flattened myself and started to roll. Wimelmina — my 9mm Luger and ever-present companion — was already in my hand. Flat on my belly, I snaked behind a brick pillar and returned fire. My first bullet hit home. I saw one of the two men drop his gun and arch his head back, clawing at his neck, shrieking. Blood spurted from his carotid artery as if it had been a high-pressure hose. He dropped, still clawing at himself. He was a dead man, watching himself die. But the other man was still very much alive. Even as my second bullet nicked his face, he dropped to the floor and wrenched his still-living friend's body in front of him. Using it as a shield, he continued to fire. Bullets kicked up dust and splinters of clay floor inches from my face. I didn't waste time and ammunition trying to hit the few inches of the gunman's skull that I could see. I turned Wilhelmina upward and sighted at the three dim bulbs which were the room's only source of light. I missed the first one, cursed, then scored three bulls-eyes. The room was plunged into thick darkness.
"Help! Please! Help me!"
Out of the deafening chaos of screams, shouts, and gunfire, a woman's voice sounded near me. I turned my head. It was the dancer. She was a few feet away, clawing desperately at the floor for shelter that wasn't there, her face contorted with terror. In the confusion her bra had been ripped away, and her naked breasts were splattered with bright splashes of blood. Remy St. Pierre's blood. I reached out one hand, grabbed her roughly by her long, thick black hair, and dragged her behind the pillar.
"Stay down," I growled. "Don't move."
She "huddled against me. I could feel the soft curves of her body against my gun arm. I held my fire for a minute, zeroing in on the flashes from the gunman's weapon. He was spraying the whole room now, laying down a line of fire that would have to include me — if I hadn't had cover. The room had become a hell-hole, a nightmare death pit littered with corpses, in which the still-living trampled screaming over the writhing bodies of the dying, slipping in pools of blood, tripping over smashed and mutilated flesh, falling themselves as bullets slammed savagely into their backs or faces. A few feet away, one man shrieked continuously, pressing his hands to his abdomen. His belly had been ripped open by bullets, and his guts were spilling out onto the floor.
"Please!" whimpered the girl next to me. "Please! Get us out of here!"
"Soon," I snapped. If there was any possibility of getting that gunman, and getting him alive, I wanted it. I steadied my hand against the pillar, sighted carefully, and squeezed off a shot. Just to let him know I was still there. If I could get him to abandon his tactic of laying down a sheet of fire in hopes of getting me at random, and force him to come looking for me in the dark — I could feel Hugo, my pencil-thin stiletto nestling comfortably in his chamois case on my arm.
"Listen!" the girl next to me said suddenly.
I ignored her, and squeezed off another shot. The firing halted for a moment, then resumed. The gunman had reloaded. And he was still firing at random.
"Listen!" the girl said again, more urgently, tugging at my arm.
I turned my head. Somewhere in the distance, over the brutal chatter of the Sten gun, I heard the distinctive piercing squawk of a police car.
"Police!" said the girl. "We
must
leave now! We
must!"
The gunman must have heard the sound, too. There was one final burst, splintering bricks on the pillar and kicking up clay from the floor uncomfortably close to where we lay, and then silence. If you could call that charnel-house of screams, moans, and flailing bodies silence. I grabbed the girl by the arm and pulled her and myself up to a half-crouch. There was no use hanging around for the post-mortems. The gunman would be long gone.
"A back exit," I snapped to the girl. "One that doesn't let out onto any street. Fast!"
"Over there," she said instantly. "Behind the wall tapestry."
I couldn't see what she was pointing to in the dark, but I took her word for it. Pulling her by the arm I groped my way along the wall, through an underbrush of human bodies, dead and dying. Hands clutched at my legs, my waist. I shoved them aside, ignoring the wailing cries all around me. I didn't have time to play Florence Nightingale. I didn't have time to be questioned by the Moroccan police.
"Under the tapestry," I heard the girl whisper behind me, "there is a wooden peg. You must pull it. Hard."
My hands found the rough wool of a Moroccan tapestry. I ripped it aside and felt under it for the peg. My hands were wet and slippery with something I knew was blood. The squawking of the police car was closer now. Suddenly, it stopped.
"Hurry!" implored the girl. "They are outside!"
I found the crudely shaped peg and pulled — as somewhere in a coolly remote part of my mind I registered the fact that, for an innocent bystander, the girl seemed a little too anxious to avoid the police.
"Hurry!" she begged. "Please!"
T pulled harder. Suddenly, T felt a section of the clay wall give. It swung back, letting a gust of cool night air into the death-stench of the room. I pushed the girl into the opening and followed her. From behind, a hand clutched desperately at my shoulder, and a body tried to push its way into the opening in front of me. My right hand swung up, and then down, in a semi-lethal karate chop. I heard an agonized grunt, and the body fell. I pushed it out of the opening with one foot and went through, shouldering the wall-section back into place behind me. I paused. Wherever we were, it was pitch black.
"This way," I heard the girl whisper near me. Her hand reached out and found mine. 'To your right. Be careful. There are steps."
I let her hand pull me along, down a flight of steps and through some sort of narrow tunnel. I had to keep my head down. There was a smell of dust, decay, and age mingling with the night air.
"This exit is rarely used," the girl whispered to me in the darkness. "It is known only by the owner and a few of his friends."
"Like the two men with Sten guns?" I suggested.
"The men with the guns were not friends. But — now we must crawl. Be careful. The opening is not large."
I found myself on my belly, wriggling through a passage just barely big enough for my body. It was damp and it stank. It didn't take much figuring for me to realize we had connected with an old, unused section of the sewer system. But five strenuous minutes later, the flow of fresh air had increased. Ahead of me, the girl stopped suddenly.
"Here," she said. "Now you must push upward. Move the grating."
I reached up and felt a rusty iron grate. Bracing my knees under me, I heaved upward with my back. It groaned, then moved up, inch by painful inch. When the opening was large enough, I motioned for the girl to squeeze through. I climbed after her. The grating dropped back into place with a muffled clang. I glanced about me: A large shed, dimly lit from the moonlight outside, shadows of machinery.
"Where are we?"
"Several blocks away from the club," said the girl. She was panting heavily. "An unused machinery shed for the port. We are safe here. Please, let me rest a moment."
I could have used a breather myself. But I had more pressing things on my mind.
"Okay," I said. "You rest. And while you rest, suppose you answer a couple of questions. One, why are you so certain those gunmen weren't friends of the owner? And two, why were you so hot to get away from that place before the police arrived?"
She continued struggling to catch her breath for a moment. I waited.
"The answer to your first question," she said finally, her voice still broken, "is that the gunmen killed Remy St. Pierre. St. Pierre was a friend of the owners, and therefore the gunmen could not also be friends of the owners."
I grabbed her by the shoulder.
"What do you know about Remy St. Pierre?"
"Please!" she cried, twisting about. "You're hurting me!"
"Answer me! What do you know about Remy St. Pierre?"
"I… Mr. Carter, I thought you knew."
"Knew?" I loosened my grip on her shoulder. "Knew what?"
"I… I am Michelle Duroche."
Two
I stared at her, still holding her shoulder. She was watching me intently.