The brisk, chopping sounds of helicopter blades filled the valley. Nick heard Abe Jefferson’s crisp voice bark out an order.
“Where’s Liz?” he asked Hakim.
Hakim winked horribly. “Behind the tall rocks, there, beautifying herself for you and scratching mightily. Be careful — she has my .22 and an itchy trigger finger. Plus itchy almost everything.”
Nick strode through the wispy smoke and found her, draped in Hakim’s bush jacket and hastily pulling a man’s short comb through her tangled hair and waving the pistol like a can of insect spray.
“Liz! You all right?” he asked anxiously.
“Oh, wonderful!” she said enthusiastically. “Thanks just a heap. It’s been the greatest, the whole thing.” She dropped the comb and gun and fell into his arms.
It was only moments later that the valley began to fill with smartly uniformed men. Nick led Liz to the waiting helicopter. Hakim followed, leaving Abe and Stonewall with the joint team of army and police.
There was plenty to talk about on the smooth flight back to Abimako. But there were two questions, and one fascinating answer, that hung in Nick’s mind for a long time afterwards.
The first came from Liz. Her question cut abruptly into one of those sudden silences that break up intense conversations.
Liz looked up from her survey of the African, plains below and said: “Who was Mirella?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Nick answered slowly. “And I don’t think I’ll ever really know.”
The second came from Nick himself.
“By the way,” he said to Hakim, “just what was it you said you teach at the University? The Seven Lively Arts?”
“That’s right.” Hakim grinned cheerfully. “Ambush, Burglary, Disguises, Mugging, Stabbing, Strangling, and Diversionary Tactics. Other elements, too, of course, but those are basic. Please, Miss Ashton! I assure you I am harmless. It is seldom I get the opportunity to practice what I preach.” He managed to focus both eyes on Nick’s startled face. “I am a criminologist,” he said. “It has long been my belief that the only way to beat the criminal at his own game is to know his every trick.”
“And you know them,” Nick said, almost reverently. “Man, you really know them!” He threw back his head and laughed with pure delight.
And even while he laughed he thought: AXE could use a man like this. I’ll talk to Hawk.
Julian Makombe stared at them from the pillows of his hospital bed. His face was drawn but his eyes were alert — and filled with horrified disbelief. He looked from Nick to Liz to the stranger called Hakim and to his wiry, trusted Chief of Police.
“I cannot believe it!” he said. “It can’t be true! My brother Rufus and the Red Chinese! You have made this up, you must have. He has never — and I know this, because he is my brother — I know he has no interest in politics or power. Jefferson, what is this madness?”
Nick touched a switch on the tiny wire recorder. “I would not have believed it either,” he said quietly, “of my own brother, or yours.”
The small machine hummed softly. An eerie voice floated across the hospital room.
“Are you the leader, Rufus? Are you sure that you’re the leader?”
“I am the leader!” Rufus yelled metallically. “I am the leader!”
Julian drew in his breath in a choking gasp, and listened.
I will be President, I will be all Nyanga... Julian and his Russian friends... They are nothing — they will die... I have more powerful friends... The gods and the Chinese... They do as I tell them...
The damning words washed over him. Nick watched and pitied, and clicked off the recorder.
“Is it all true, then?” Julian whispered. “Abe — Chief Jefferson — is it true?”
Abe nodded soberly. “I saw it all. I heard it. Mr. President, it’s true. I am sorry.”
Julian sighed. He turned his gaze to Nick. “And so you killed him,” he said flatly. His tired eyes flickered over to Liz. “I cannot forgive him for what he has done — to all of us. To all of you. But I wish... I wish that I could have spoken to him.”
“You will be able to,” Abe said briskly. “You will be well long before he is, but he is far from dead. Merely incapacitated. He’ll live.”
Julian achieved one of those curious reversals common to those weakened by illness. He turned his head to Nick and said: “He would be better dead. You should have killed him.”
Nick rose from the bedside.
“Perhaps,” he said quietly. “But I could not bring myself to kill the brother of the man who asked me here to help him.”
Julian stared at him. Something of the shadow lifted from his gaunt face. “I expected an unorthodox ambassador,” he said, “but nothing quite so extraordinary.” He sighed, and then the suggestion of a smile touched his lips. “I hear you disappeared from your hotel room in Dakar?”
“I did,” said Nick. “Ambassador Carter came to an inexplicable end. I don’t know what Dakar is coming to.”
“Neither do I,” Julian answered gravely. “But you can be sure that I’ll send my condolences and thanks to your State Department.”
They left him, then; left him to the nurses and the doctors and his thoughts.
The immensely fat man sat behind the desk and stared across it. Disgust and loathing exuded from his yellow, moon-shaped face as the sibilant voice snaked about his ears.
“I wasss unfortunate,” said the other man, in his peculiarly nasal tone that was half-whine, half-hiss. “The first time I wasss naturally interesssted in the other man, that ssskulking Arab...”
“I already know about the first time,” snapped the fat man. “What about Dakar — what went wrong there?”
The man with the green face shrugged and stuck out his lower lip.
“What could I do? My arrangementsss were already made, to have that Carter brought to me and questioned, but Rufusss wasss determined to have him killed at once — all he wanted to do wasss get rid of him and not bother about finding out how much he knew or who elssse he might be working with.”
“What happened in Dakar?”
“I am telling you. We agreed that I was first to try to force the American to talk, but Rufus kept getting in the way. He would keep sending his killers after Carter, and alerting him so that he became ten times more cautious than he was before. It made things most difficult for me.” The whining voice was querulous. “It was hard enough — as it was.”
“And the Hop Club? How did you miss him there?” The fat man shifted impatiently in his gigantic chair. The rolls of fat that reached from his shoulders to his ears bobbled like agitated jelly. “Come, Laszlo, you have not done well. Explain how you failed the second time.”
“How could I know it was him?” Laszlo hissed indignantly. “He came disguised as a drug peddler from here, from Casablanca. I did not even know who he was when I went after him, and then he shot me in the ssshoulder, the ssswine! After that, bleeding as I was, I got the ssstory from that fat — that is to say, from Madame Sophia. She had even mentioned the Big One in Casablanca, the ssstupid old drab! And when she saw our radio operator was dead, and the police came pounding at the front door, she got frightened and threatened to tell some wild story that would save her neck and hang the rest of us, give away our entire operation. So of course I had to kill her, and I jussst barely managed to get away before the police came through to the back.” His frog-lidded eyes drew together in a frown as he recalled his narrow escape. Then they brightened suddenly. “You may care to know how I managed with Madame Sophia, whom as you know is of a size considerable compared with me. I selected the stabbing knife, the one with the long blade, and positioned it — thus!” He shot his right cuff and a gleaming spike appeared in his hand. “Then I jabbed at the soft underbelly...!”