Assignmnt - Ceylon Read Free

former lover? He wished he did not have to live with perpetual questions and suspicion. But in this business he was what K Section had made of him. Then he corrected the thought: he was what he always had been, what his potential had insisted on him being and doing. He preferred the solitary life, the danger, the caution required to subsist in the cities and jungles of the world. The planet was going mad, he sometimes thought. He did his best to stamp out the insane sparks and brush fires that sprang up here and there in the far corners of the earth. It was his job. He did it well. He wanted peace more than most men, because he had too often seen the face on the other side of the coin. He did not call himself a patriot; but he had risked his life, and his body bore too many scars of too many encounters with the forces of those with ambition, with lusts for power that were almost an anachronism in today’s tightly knit, interdependent world.
    He stood up.
    Aspara said, “You are going?”
    “I’ve sent two men to Kandy to inquire about Ira there. He had a house near the city, where he studied Ceylonese antiquities.”
    She nodded. “Yes, I know.”
    “I have to look after them,” he said.
    “I thought each of you accepted his own risks.”
    “That’s true.”
    “Then stay, Sam,” she said.
    The creaking bullock cart, with its arched roof, had passed the bungalow. He watched it out of sight. The carter had seemed an ordinary man of Negombo. But one could never be certain.
    He said, “I don’t want to implicate you in this, Aspara. Your political position is delicate, and any scandal—” “No one knows I am here with you.” She smiled. “Why did you watch the cart that way?”
    He shrugged. “It’s habit.”
    She shivered a little. “As I said, you somehow frighten me, and yet—”
    “Do you want me to buy Ira back from the PFM?”
    “Not out of personal motives. But it would be the easiest solution to the problem.”
    “Where do you suppose they are keeping him?”
    “We still have jungles and mountains, swamps and caves, in the interior of Ceylon where few men go.” She waved a delicate hand vaguely. Her great eyes regarded him with a new light. Her silk saree changed colors with the lowering sun. Under the silk, her body was ripe and gentle, an offering to him, spoken with her eyes, her hands, the way she leaned forward, and he remembered her with an intimate hunger.
    “Dear Sam Durell-—She checked herself. “I would be devastated if I believed you came to see me only on your— your business. Do stay.”
    “You should be more discreet, Aspara. If your political opponents learned of a liaison with me—”
    “I told you—we are secret here, no one knows.”
    “Don’t count on it,” he said. “My man in Colombo, a Mr. Dhapura, might want to get in touch with me. He’s pretty good at it.”
    “The hotel man?” She laughed softly, dismissing the risk. Her laughter was like the distant tinkling of the monks’ bells in the Angurukaramulla temple. “We will be most discreet, dear Sam.”

    three
    He thought, Aspara in the Sinhala language means heavenly maiden.
    He sat down again.
    There are varying techniques taught at the Farm in Maryland, K Section’s training and refresher school for recruits and old hands. The methods and patterns of shadowing a subject or of shaking oft' a tail are constantly updated, studied, modified, and polished. There are the parallel methods, using two or more agents, the jump-ahead, the close or the distant pursuit, the use of transportation, taxis, buses, private cars, the overt contact, the brush contact. These are used whether the subject is the pursuer or the pursued. Durell knew all the techniques and had refined some of them to his own purposes. He was being trailed. He was a target for assassination. What he did not know in this instance was why he was the objective. Nor did he even remotely suspect the identity of his pursuers.
    The taxi driver