The Colonel gazed off into the distance. It must be an extremely important case, he mused.
Sir?
Just on the face of it, from what little we know. Stern and Colly's successor supposedly working against each other? Yet at the same time, not working against each other in some strange way? My God, if you had ever wanted two men to do something for you out here, it goes without saying you would have picked Stern and Colly.
And Colly's successor?
The Colonel shook his head.
Yes I know. It's a mystery, and a pity.
Sir?
Oh it's just that I always had such great affection for Colly, and I suppose I must be inadvertently transferring some of those feelings to his successor, this new Purple Seven.
The Colonel smiled, almost shyly.
Odd, how we do that. I haven't the least idea who this Purple Seven is. He's just a man without a name whom we call the Armenian for convenience. Yet I can't help but feel sad when I think about him. Where he is now and what he knows and what it's come down to for him, just all of it. Of course there's no rational explanation for my feelings, but all the same, a man who could uncover the truth about Stern. .
The Colonel sighed.
Well I guess we'll just have to see, that's all.
***
At a remote site in the desert, deep within an ancient fortresslike structure, a monk in a hooded cassock moved quickly down a narrow subterranean corridor lit at rare intervals by torches fixed to the walls. The corridor disappeared in the gloom and the only sound was the muffled swish of the monk's robes as he padded quietly down the worn stones in the half-light.
The monk was a powerful stocky man with an unkempt beard, which only partially covered the piece of his jaw that was missing. He stopped at a low iron door cut into the rock, pausing before he flung it open, a shattering noise in the underground stillness.
The monk was facing a tiny cell. At the far end a man with only one arm knelt in front of a plain wooden cross, his back to the door, heavy chains twisting away from his ankles to a rusty iron ring in the wall.
When the door slammed open the man's wasted body jerked forward, flinching away from the crashing noise. But he didn't turn around nor did he lower his hand, which remained in front of him in an attitude of supplication.
The man looked like a desert hermit. His hair was matted and his bare feet were black with dirt.
Apparently he had been praying in absolute darkness, for the cell lacked even a candle, only a little light reaching it now from the flickering torches in the corridor. The face of the hooded monk was invisible in the blackness.
For a time neither man moved in the shadowy silence, the two of them somber and stationary in the separate poses of their separate worlds, the powerful stocky monk framed in the low iron doorway, the shackled man facing the crumbling wall as he trembled, waiting. And then all at once the distant opening chords of Bach's Mass in B Minor could be heard booming forth from somewhere high above them in the ancient fortresslike structure.
The monk crossed himself and removed a coiled whip from under his cassock, a long thick scourge of braided leather. He let the whip unwind until it dangled down to the floor, an ugly many-tongued lash.
The shackled man jerked slightly, his head sinking lower. It was cold in the cell, yet drops of sweat had broken out around the lips of the monk. He licked the sweat away and spoke in a hard contemptuous voice.
The Armenian survived the hand grenade, he said.
The stark words rang in the stillness and a sudden spasm gripped the shackled man, an unmistakable shudder of eagerness, an almost sensual expression of loathing. Frantically he began clawing at the rags on his shoulders, stripping them back to reveal his wasted flesh, deathly white skin crossed with dark uneven scars. In another moment the kneeling man had bared himself to the waist and buried his face in his single hand, rigid again, waiting.
The monk stood with his feet wide apart. He whipped the scourge into the air and brought it down with all his strength on the pale back of the kneeling man. The ugly leather tongues hissed and whined against the flesh, snapping up again. After the third brutal lashing the monk tossed the bloodied scourge into a corner. He licked his lips and stared. The shackled man had been driven to the floor by the force of the blows, and it was only with a great effort that he managed to raise himself to his knees.
He was breathing heavily, fighting to keep from falling back on his face. Again he raised his one thin hand to the cross on the wall in an attitude of supplication, the palm of his open hand now wet with tears. His body shook violently as he tried to control himself.
The Armenian's a dead man, muttered the tortured figure. He's dead but he doesn't know it yet. Kill him.
But he has eluded us, murmured the monk with great deference. We don't know where he is, Your Grace.
In that case, whispered the shackled man, find him and then kill him.
Yes, Your Grace.
The monk lingered a few moments to see if there were to be any further instructions. But the shackled man in rags seemed oblivious to his presence now, so the monk backed slowly away into the corridor and closed the heavy iron door on the tiny cell, leaving his scourged superior alone once more in the blackness with his ripped flesh and his simple cross, alone and bleeding. . praying.
— 3-
Hopi Mesa Kiva
Some months before the obscure gunrunner Stern was killed in Cairo, a large black automobile sped silently down a remote secondary road deep in the arid wastelands of the American southwest.
In the rear of the automobile sat three distinguished gray-haired men, wearing rumpled white linen suits and broad Panama hats, their faces creased by the long journey from Washington in a military aircraft. In addition to having been youthful heroes for their respective nations in the First World War, the three shared reputations for unorthodox brilliance in their different professions. And now with a new war sweeping over the earth, they had become men of vast secret powers in innumerable corners of the world.
Of the three, only the Britisher was completely unknown to his countrymen at large. An old Etonian and a member of two London clubs, he was a professional military officer who had been a colonel in the Life Guards before being anonymously seconded, years earlier, to an anonymous post requiring strictly anonymous secret duties, in keeping with traditional British anonymity in matters of intelligence.
At the moment he was knitting.
The Canadian was small and slight with hooded eyes that watched everything. Originally famous as an air ace in a Sopwith Camel, then as the world lightweight boxing champion and the man who had perfected the method of sending photographs by radio, he had gone on to become a millionaire industrialist with worldwide business interests.
The Canadian was stirring a mixture over ice in a chemist's beaker.
While the large Irish-American contented himself with gazing out the window at the dwindling light of that late desert afternoon. A law-school classmate of the American president and the former commander of the famed New York regiment known as the Fighting Sixty-ninth, he was a self-made success who had become a Wall Street lawyer with international dealings.
The Britisher was known to the other two men as Ming, from the first syllable of his surname, which wasn't spelled that way at all. He was the first to break the silence in the backseat.