“Oh, it isn’t that you’re not presentable,” she began, and stopped suddenly. Hesitantly, she made her way to a chair and sat down on the edge. But she did not avert her eyes as Nick took a fresh shirt from the bureau drawer. She stared at him and thought he looked so much better without his glasses or his shirt and with his hair half-damp and tousled. But she could scarcely encourage him to stay undressed.
When he turned to her just seconds later he was the well-dressed, well-combed, slightly stiff-backed special emissary she had traveled with from Dakar.
“Will you join me in some breakfast?” he said hospitably. “Mine’s on its way. At least, I hope it is.”
“Oh, no thank you,” she said, still slightly flushed. “I shouldn’t have burst in on you this way. But Ambassador Thurston wanted you to have these at once.” Liz Ashton delved briskly into a ladylike briefcase not much bigger than her trim pocketbook. “Some dispatches came in while we were on our way into town, quite urgent and highly confidential. I thought it best to bring them to you myself. They’re about...”
“Dispatches before breakfast?” Nick interrupted, crossing over to her. “I couldn’t look one in the eye. Do you know the song, ‘How do you like your eggs? I like mine with a kiss’? Well, that’s my position exactly. And if we’re going to be working together, we should lose no time in getting acquainted.” He put his hands lightly on her shoulders and bent his head over hers. She started back, her eyes shocked and incredulous.
“Why...!”
“Hush,” he whispered into her ear, enjoying the faint whiff of perfume. “Be careful what you say. We’re being overheard.” He loosed a smacking kiss into the air just above her head. “The room is wired.” Nick stepped back and patted her hand like an elderly cavalier. “Now I promise you I won’t make another pass until... oh, at least until I’ve had my coffee. Look. No hands.” He spread them out palms upward and grinned at her.
“Why, Mr. Carter! You surprise me,” Liz said with mock severity, and a new look of comprehension in her eyes.
“It’s just that you look so charming,” he said earnestly. “I couldn’t help myself. And I can’t stand business before breakfast.”
“What would you have done if Ambassador Thurston had brought the reports over himself?” she asked, smiling. “Or sent Tad Fergus?”
“Well, certainly not that,” Nick said emphatically. “I know people say unkind things about the State Department, but they’re really not true at all — most of them.”
Liz laughed. She had dimples, Nick noted approvingly, and the soft but distinct laugh lines of an attractive young woman who often found life funny and didn’t care who knew it. “Well, some of them obviously are. I take it you don’t want these things, then?” she patted her briefcase enquiringly.
Nick sighed. “I hadn’t planned to start work nearly so soon. But you might as well go ahead and give them to me; I’ll have a quick look.”
She placed a thick sealed envelope into his outstretched hand. Opening it, he found a report from “our man in Morocco,” a freshly compiled list of recent local happenings, and a coded cable from Hawk. Liz watched with a slightly quizzical expression as he drew the cable from its dull-red wrapper. She knew the color meant Top Secret, For Your Eyes Only, and that the contents must be highly classified intelligence matters. It seemed strange to her that he could be so casual about it all.
But it was only his surface manner that was casual. Hawk’s message read:
ACTION IVAN REVISES EARLY ESTIMATE WITH TRUE APPRAISAL ORIGINAL FAKES NOT RED WHITE AND BLUE BUT RED WITH WIDE YELLOW STRIPE ITEM DOUBLE-CHECK LOCAL TEAM PROVES TRUE BLUE FOR USE ITEM URGE YOU CONSIDER WHITE HOUSE LEAD.
Nick’s brows drew together. Most of it was obvious enough. “Action Ivan” referred to the AXE contact in the Kremlin. Agent P-4 had gained access to the original of Rubitchev’s report on the bomb fragments found after the Nyanga explosions. They were not American, as Polikov had claimed, but Red Chinese. Obviously the Russian delegate had lied to cover up the growing rift between the two titans of Communism. The “local team” of American officials — and that included Liz — had been checked out again by the AXE Snoop Group and found loyal and reliable beyond all reasonable doubt. But “White House lead”? That meant Casablanca, not the U.S. President. Nick glanced quickly at the Moroccan report.
Translated from AXE-talk into English, it complained bitterly about the impossibility of one man being able to report adequately on a city the size of Casablanca. But the writer could say that he’d noted a definite increase in the amount of Oriental shipping touching at Casa and the large number of recent narcotics cases. He ended with the usual plea for an assistant.
Nick smiled to himself at the familiar scream for help and swiftly skimmed the local data sheet. An isolated farmhouse attacked. A mysterious explosion in a grain storehouse. A riverboat stolen by an armed mob. His smile vanished.
He rose abruptly and reached for the one desk drawer that had a sturdy lock and key.
“That does it,” he said crisply. “That tells me just about all I need to know.” He made great play of opening, shutting and locking the drawer, and thrust the papers into his pocket. “I’ll leave them here for the time being.”
Liz watched him with her mouth open.
“But...” she began.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said confidently. “They’ll be safe enough. Tell me this — is there a cafe or a restaurant around here called the Croix du Nord?”
He knew very well that there was. He’d done his homework well.
“Why, yes,” she said, bewildered.
“Ah! So it does mean that,” he announced with satisfaction. “I’m to be there at twelve o’clock today. With the least bit of luck I’ll have the last piece of the puzzle in my hands before my lunchtime meeting with Makombe.”
Which was nonsense, and he knew it. But what was the use of having a bugged room if you didn’t put the bugs to work?
He winked at her. She closed her mouth and gave a shrug of resignation. Maybe he really did know what he was doing.
A heavy hand thundered at his bedroom door.
“Ah! Breakfast,” he exclaimed. “At last.” Moving to the door in long-legged, athletic strides, he stepped to one side before throwing it open.
An immense uniformed policeman, buttons gleaming and great muscles bulging beneath the neat khaki tunic, stood on the landing and literally filled the doorway. He was a good six and a half feet tall, Nick judged, feeling almost puny, and his blue-black face looked like the business end of a battering ram. One vast hand touched the forehead in a crisp salute.
Goliath spoke.
“The Honorable Mr. Carter?” The giant’s voice was music.
Nick nodded. Liz, he could see, recognized the larger-than-lifesize apparition.
“The name’s Carter,” he admitted.
The saluting arm described a snappy downward swing that would have dropped an ox if there had been one in its way. Two horseshoe-sized heels snapped together. Now that the doorway was somewhat less than completely blocked, Nick became aware of a second man.
“Corporal Temba at your service, sir,” said the incredibly dulcet tones. “Chief of Police Abe Jefferson begs your indulgence, sir.”
“Abe Jefferson?” Nick repeated involuntarily, and stared into the passage for what he thought could only be another unbelievable being.
Corporal Temba stepped smartly and silently aside. The second man stepped into view.
He was about half Temba’s size and was dressed like an ad for a Saville Row suit. His brown, young-old face reminded Nick of a good-humored and highly intelligent monkey. But there was more than intelligence and humor in the penetrating eyes. It was too soon to tell exactly what it was, but it was something that reminded Nick partly of Hawk at his most perceptive and partly of his onetime friend and fellow agent Joe O’Brien who had died laughing. Laughing, because he had misled his torturers magnificently; and died, because they had found out in time to take revenge.