Grofield went over to where they were lying on the floor, frisked one of them, and found a passport. The name of the country would be on the front, of course, and so it was: SHQIPENIJA.
Oh for Christ’s sake. Grofield leafed through the passport, saw that passport photos were just as badly done in Shqipenija as in the United States, and learned that the owner of the passport was named Gjul Enver Shkumbi and he’d been born in Shkodër, Shqipenija, on the twenty-second of some incomprehensible month in 1928.
Vivian came over, saying, “What are you doing?”
“Trying to figure out where these people come from,” he said, and handed her the passport. “That make any sense to you?”
She glanced at it. “Albania,” she said, and handed it back.
“Albania?” He frowned at the passport again. “If it’s Albania, why doesn’t it say Albania?”
She said, “Because they don’t speak English in Albania, they speak Shqyp.” She pronounced it shkyip. “And in Shqyp,” she went on, “Albania is Shqipenija. That means eagle country.”
“Oh does it.” Grofield shook his head, and dropped the passport on its owner. “Albania,” he said. “That means they’re working for Russia, huh?”
“Probably not,” she said.
Grofield frowned at her. “Aren’t they Communists?”
“I keep forgetting how nonpolitical you are,” she said. “Albania tends to be more in the Chinese camp than the Russian. The Chinese often use Albanian agents in parts of the world where Chinese agents would be too obvious.”
“These people are working for China?”
“Probably. But Albania is a Warsaw Treaty member, so it is possible they’re working for the Russians, but the Russians prefer to use their own people. They could even be working for Yugoslavia, though I doubt it.”
“Oh, shut up,” Grofield said. “You know, my buddy Ken told me some of the Free Quebec outfits were Maoist, with Communist Chinese connections. Would that make sense? The Chinese found out there was something going on, sent in their Albanian friends and had them link up with one of the wilder Free Quebec groups for local assistance. How does that sound?”
“It sounds right,” she said. “And I think we definitely don’t want the Chinese to get those canisters. They’re not afraid of anything, those people, they’d shoot off a toe to get rid of a corn.”
“That’s graphic,” Grofield said. “All right, let’s get on with it.” He went over to the opposite door and slowly turned the knob. The door opened inward, and he cracked it just an inch, peering through the slit at the main room.
It didn’t look much changed. Some of the furniture was knocked over, and a couple of windows were broken, but they were the only signs of the battle that had raged here earlier tonight. As it had been when Grofield had first come here, the middle area of the room was empty, the occupants clustered around the fireplaces at both ends. With the broken windows, they had even more reason for that now. And the result, from Grofield’s point of view, was a positive good, since it meant there was no one at all near this door.
He opened the door a little wider, and studied the people down at the far end of the room. He recognized Marba down there, but no one else, and it was clear who were the prisoners and who were the guards. The prisoners, seven or eight of them, sat in a morose huddle near the fire, with the three guards on chairs a little farther away, guns resting on their laps. There didn’t seem to be any conversation going on down there at all.
Grofield moved back from the door and motioned Vivian over, whispering, “Look down to the left. Any of our four down there?”
She stood against the wall and peered through the opening, taking her time, but finally stepping back and shaking her head.
Grofield gently pushed the door closed again and said, “It’s going to be trickier looking the other way. You wouldn’t have a mirror on you, would you?”
“Of course I have. A girl doesn’t travel without her compact.”
“She doesn’t?”
She took a round compact from her jacket pocket, and held it up. “She doesn’t.”
“Good. What you do, when I open the door again you hold that out just far enough so you can see the people at the other end. Try to make it as fast as you can, and try not to move the mirror around very much. We don’t want anybody’s eye attracted by glints and reflections.”
She nodded. “I’ll do it fast,” she promised.
They got into position, and Grofield opened the door again, just enough for her to extend the open compact through. She closed one eye and squinted the other, studying the reflection in the mirror, turning it slightly twice, then bringing it back in again. Grofield shut the door, and Vivian shook her head, saying, “Not there either.”
“They have to make it tough,” Grofield commented. “They’ve probably got them locked away upstairs someplace for safekeeping. I wish I knew how much these people knew.”
“From the way they act,” she said, “they know everything except where the canisters are.”
“So they’d know to keep the four Americans separate and under heavy guard. All right, let’s go see how many ways there are to get upstairs.”
They crossed the room to the door they’d come in, and Grofield was just reaching for the knob when Vivian grabbed his arm and whispered, “Listen!”
He listened, and heard the sounds of boots on stairs. Ba-thump, ba-thump, and the sounds of people talking. A group coming down a flight of stairs, then coming right by this door and going on down the hall toward the rear exit.
“Damn!” Grofield muttered.
She said, “What is it?”
“Relief,” Grofield told her. “They’re on their way outside to take over guard duty.”
“That’s bad,” she said.
“I couldn’t agree more.” He stood leaning his head against the door, listening, and as soon as he heard the outer door open he yanked the knob and hurried out to the hall, moving so fast he saw the last of the relief guards going out down at the farther end of the hall.
The hall was L-shaped, the bottom leg going off briefly to the right, ending at a flight of stairs leading upward. Grofield said, “From now on we have to move very fast and not worry about noise. Come on.”
They raced up the stairs, Grofield taking them three at a time, up nine steps to a landing, then reverse and up six more to the second floor, entering on the top left of a T-shaped hall. There was no one in sight along the top bar, but when he reached the middle and looked down the long hallway to his right he saw three men with Bren guns sitting on chairs in front of a closed door midway down on the left. He braced his feet and fired a burst from the machine gun, spraying them, and they flipped over all at once, like a sand castle demolished by an invisible tide.
Grofield ran forward, and out of a room on the right came two startled men, guns in their hands. Grofield fired hastily at them, and one fell but the other ducked back out of sight. Grofield ran past that doorway, seeing a dozen more of them in there, and shouted back to Vivian, just rounding the turn back there, “Keep them bottled up!” He pointed the machine gun at the doorway he meant. “Stay there and keep them bottled up!”
“I will!”
He ran on to the doorway guarded by the three dead men and tried the knob. It was locked. He kicked the door, and it held firm.
Someone inside shouted, “Watch it, there’s two in here!”
Vivian’s gun chattered, and Grofield looked down the hall in time to see somebody ducking back into the squad room. He shouted, “Vivian, for Christ’s sake, no warning shots! If you get a chance at them, kill them!”