Assignment - Budapest Read Online Free Page A

shelter hut toward the waiting plane. He somehow managed to fill the small room with his presence and the quiet strength of his personality. Durell often wondered about this small gray man who knew so much, whose connections made a web that girdled the world, and whose job was the anonymous direction of strategy in this dark, silent war that seemed to go on forever.
    “I was wondering how soon it would occur to you, Sam,” he said. “You’re going to have to be very careful.”
    “Is Korvuth a blind, then?”
    “We don’t know. Your guess at this stage of the game is as good as mine. You’ve seen his picture?” When Durell shook his head, McFee took out a small leather folder containing a photograph of a gray-haired man of about forty, with mild eyes and a saddle nose and a prim little bowtie. “Don’t let him see you first, Sam. Looks like a small-time business man, doesn’t he? Looks harmless, eh?”
    “No, not harmless,” Durell said. He had felt a quick twist of something turning over in him when McFee suggested a guard for Deirdre. He wasn’t sure, but it could have been fear for her, and this dismayed him, because he knew he should not be thinking of anything now except the job McFee was discussing. He knew McFee was watching him, an objective curiosity in the little general’s pale gray eyes. He didn’t think anything showed in his face as he went on. “The eyes in this photo are all wrong. It shows there, and in his mouth, too. Is Korvuth a Magyar?”
    “Hard to tell about these people. I pulled what we had on friend Bela out of the dossier files, but it isn’t much. The rest of the physical description makes him about five-ten, weight one-seventy, a little paunchy, but awfully, awfully fast. So don’t let his sloppy physique fool you. It isn’t that way at all. His hair is brown, his eyes are brown, and he’s got a steel-capped molar in the lower right jaw. We got that from a dentist in Buda who worked on Korvuth last year.”
    “All right,” Durell said. “Don’t kid me about it, please.” “I’m not kidding. There’s nothing to laugh about or ignore about this man. Bela Korvuth is probably the greatest master of political assassination and sudden death since the Middle Ages. We know he was responsible for the disappearance of Boganov in Prague two years ago, when Boganov anticipated the swing away from Stalin and jumped the gun. Now the pendulum is reversed, and even if they had let Boganov live, he’d be in the doghouse again. Then there was the poisoning of Imre Kardovi in Bucharest last year, the death of the wife of a Soviet attache in London six months ago—she had fallen in love with a junior clerk in Downing Street—and there was the killing of those two MGB boys who made contact with Frank Duggan in Rome and wanted to peddle a few secrets to us. You can check the rest of it in the office when you get a chance. But you have to get an idea of what this man is, Sam. When the freedom fighters in Hungary were stringing up AVO men by the heels from lampposts in Budapest, Korvuth was giving orders to machine-gun women and children in Parliament Square, and we know he personally organized the deportation movement when the Russians sent in their Mongolian troops. Another idea of what sort of man this is, and his nerve, is the fact that he deliberately took the chance of mingling with the refugees to get over here, when he’d have been torn to pieces by them if they learned who he was. All I want to impress on you is that this man is as good or better than you. I don’t want to lose you on this, Sam. And he’s here to do a double job.”
    “It still doesn’t add up,” Durell said, frowning.
    “Well, he was Stella Marni’s lover back in Budapest in fifty-four. We just got that recently. You put the Marni woman on ice six months ago, and he’s going to enjoy cutting your heart out.”
    “No,” Durell said, “he’s too professional to let that bother him.” He lit a