“So?” said Hawk, and now the smile had vanished from his eyes. But there was no distrust in his reposing face, and he was a man who thought that trust was for children and fools.
“So,” said Valentina. Her huge bulk shifted uncomfortably in the undersized chair. “It is not easy for me to phrase myself but I will try. First, I am woman, therefore interfering. Second, I am Russian Intelligence, therefore suspicious of small things. And I was most suspicious of small blackouts and other disturbances in Moscow and the nearby cities that took place a year or so ago. Small, I say, because under our system it is impossible to have large-scale power failure — I interest you?”
“You interest us,” Hawk said tersely. “Please go on.”
“But then the incidents ceased. It was as if they had come under control. Yet, no one could explain them. No one could say how they started, no one could say why they corrected themselves, and no one could begin to suggest why they suddenly ceased altogether.” The genial, peasant woman’s look was gone from Valentina’s face and in its place was the look of a woman of intellect and perceptivity. “Then with the cessation of those events I noticed something else. In the course of several weeks a number of men left Moscow. Many people do, of course. But they come back. Those men did not. They left without return clearance. Ordinarily, that would mean nothing. But to me it meant something that two of them left a certain restaurant, another two a laundry, three of them an embassy, one a trade mission and one a gift shop. All of them left for what seemed to me most trivial reasons — and they have vanished into limbo.”
She paused a moment, her lively eyes raking across Hawk’s face and Nick’s.
“You ask, So what?” she went on, with a gesture of one enormous hand. “I will tell you. For several months I put my thoughts in the back of my mind Then things begin to happen in your United States. Many power failures. What you call smog. Much pollution, much more even than you people consider normal. Many strange things, too many of them impossible of explanation. I think back to the big power failure of November, Nineteen-sixty-five. Already I have noticed with interest your nuclear West Valley plant — I have liaison with scientific circles, and I indulge in little hobby of nuclear physics. Also cooking. But I talk some other time of cooking. Now, I am making point that I have long had interest in nuclear power, and therefore in West Valley. And when I am thinking back to the big blackout, I recall reading reports of where the trouble started. Not far, it occurs to me, from the West Valley plant.”
“Not very far, true,” Hawk interjected, “although several miles beyond the border. But the plant was not affected. There was no hint of trouble there.”
“Of that I am aware,” Valentina rumbled. “The proximity means nothing, perhaps. On the first occasion, at least, I think it very likely was coincidence. But what if it should happen again, and what if the plant is then affected? Does it not cause you concern that it happens to be in the sector of your country most frequently disturbed by power failures? Coincidence again, perhaps. But so many things happening lately’ — and her big hand slammed down upon a tabletop — “all these things are not coincidence. There are too many of them. They are too puzzling. There is too much at once. Yes? It makes for an uneasiness. I myself think — no, I cannot tell you all I think. It is too much. Flights of fancy, Smirnov said. Suspicions of a woman. Not my business. Yet, he, too, was curious about the vanishing Chinese.”
“Chinese?” said Nick; and Hawk sucked in a deep breath and sat back in his chair, eyes half-closed but his lean body almost vibrating with interest.
“Chinese,” said Valentina. “The nine men who left Moscow after our little “power failures ceased. As if they had been practicing on us. And had left us, then, for other pastures. Yes, they were all Chinese.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Hakim The Hideous
Agent D5 sat in the palmy lobby of the Semiramis Hotel and looked at his watch for the tenth time. Damn the fellow for being late, when there was pressing AXE business waiting back in Baghdad! And damn Hawk, too, for sending him scurrying off to Cairo like some messenger boy.
Now cut that out, Eiger, he told himself. The old man wouldn’t have sent you here if it hadn’t been pretty urgent. It’s not for long, anyway. One quick meeting with him, may-, be a little sightseeing with him for window dressing, and that’s it.
Agent Eiger settled back behind his newspaper and turned to the editorial pages. But his mind was on the coming meeting, and where they should go once they had met. Obviously they couldn’t talk here. Nor did Sadek want the meeting in his own home, which was understandable if there was something in the air. He wondered briefly if he could have missed the fellow, then decided almost at once that he could not. Hawk’s descriptions — Carter’s, too — had a way of being devastatingly accurate. As for Eiger himself, he was wearing the prescribed light suit and dark blue tie, reading the London Times and carrying a worn leather camera bag. No, impossible that they should miss each other.
Two blocks away, Hakim Sadek was paying his third taxi fare of the evening and wondering if he had not, after all, chosen the wrong place to meet when Eiger had called him. But it was natural to meet a so-called tourist in a hotel lobby at this hour of the evening, and such places were, in any event, more suitable than, say, a lonely mosque or Sadek’s own small house.
Hakim walked briskly part way around the block and into an arcade. Two minutes later he entered a side door of the Semiramis and headed for the lobby.
Yes, that would be Eiger. A little pompous-looking, as Nicholas had warned him, but craggy-jawed and hard of eye as all good AXEmen should be.
Eiger had lowered his newspaper to look at the trickle of people entering the main door of the lobby. Sadek was more than half an hour late. Concern was building in him; concern and curiosity about this man who was Carter’s trusted friend. It would be interesting to see what a friend of Carter’s would be like. If he ever showed up.
Maybe he had better call the fellow’s home.
Then he saw the man who was walking toward him with that curious shambling stride, and he knew it must be Sadek.
But Godalmighty! How could Hawk and Carter trust such a man? The description had been accurate, as usual, but it paled beside reality.
The figure that came toward him was tall and slightly hunched, and the face that seemed to hover suspiciously above it would have made an Arab slave-trader look benign by comparison. The flickering, unmatched eyes, the pockmarked, skin, the cruelly curved thin lips, the sidling walk, all added up to a picture of unbelievable depravity.
A clawed hand came toward him and a sibilant voice outraged his ears: “Feelthy peectures, meester?”
Oh, my God, no! thought Eiger. It’s too much.
Although it was a code phrase that he had been expecting to hear, coming from this evil-looking man, this caricature of a purveyor of filth, this epitome of smutty malevolence, it was indeed too much.
“Only if they’re sharp,” said Eiger, “showing all the details.”
Involuntarily he brushed away the hand that reached for his, as if it were as slippery as this man looked. The hand rose and clapped down on his shoulder in a surprisingly crisp and muscular grip.
“Hakim Sadek, at your service,” said the loathsome man before him. The tall, hunched body seemed to straighten, almost to fill out, and the incredibly awful face split sud denly into an even more incredible attractive grin. “And you are — you must be —?”
“Dan Eiger, at yours,” said Eiger, staring. This astounding man seemed to be transforming himself before his very eyes. He was still impossibly ugly, but he was no longer a furtive creature of the back streets; he was now a man who stood upright and foursquare, a man of culture and breeding and intelligence and… wholesomeness, by God! The change was indefinable, but it was there. Pock marks, thin lips, squint of eyes, none of these had changed. And yet…