Assignment - Karachi by Edward S. Aarons Read Free Book Online

the Koran, held forth in strident voices. It was a quarter occupied by emigrants and refugees crowding into the city because of the seasonal drought. Some of the transients worked the docks along the muddy channels of the Indus, others found occupation in the slum streets. Traffic tangled insanely in the heat. There were bullock wagons and bicycle rickshaws and twowheeled donkey carts, three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, and ordinary rickshaws drawn by skinny, brown, barefooted men in dirty shorts or swathed in the sheet-like lungyis wrapped around their bodies. Here and there a covered tonga cart went by, drawn by a skeletal horse.
    They passed the resettlement project on Drigh Road, cut in and out of the nondescript interurban commuter buses, came into an area of new stucco houses, spacious yards and brown lawns. Water tanks probed the coppery sky from every roof, since Karachi provided no municipal water pressure, and air-conditioners wheezed and pumped in every balcony window.
    Lathri K’Ayub was patient with the traffic, soft-faced and sleepy-eyed. “You wish to consult with Mr. Donegan at once?” he asked Durell, as they reached the more spacious part of the city.
    “I think it would be wise.”
    “And Miss Standish?” His yellow eyes slid to Jane’s knees.
    Durell said, “She will accompany me, from now on.” “As you wish. I have some business to attend to. A plane is ready for tomorrow’s flight to Rawalpindi, where we meet Hans Steicher. The von Buhlens are at a villa rented by Miss Standish. I shall leave the scout car for your convenience, if you will forgive my abandoning you.” “Are the others being guarded against any attempts at injury or sabotage?”
    “Indeed, yes. Although I am not fully convinced as to the fate of the original expedition members. If they met with foul play, however, the plot will be crushed.”
    There was something about the colonel that reminded Durell of other strong men in new countries—tough, ruthless, ambitious.
    “We’ll see,” Durell said.
    Donegan’s suite of offices was in a recently constructed building that was fully air-conditioned, when the apparatus worked. It felt cool, even clammy, after the blasting heat in the streets. Durell took Jane King’s arm and led her reluctantly down the corridor.
    “Must I go with you?” the girl murmured.
    “Why not? I’m supposed to be your bodyguard.”
    “But shouldn’t you go directly to see Miss Sarah?” “She’s safe. I have to assume I can trust K’Ayub.” She looked away and murmured, “I’ve discovered you can’t trust anybody in this world.”
    “Why so discouraged. Because you’re going to lose the extra pay Miss Standish promised you to pose as a. stand-in and target?”
    “Maybe” she said bitterly.
    “You ought to consider yourself well out of it.”
    She looked uneasy. “Are you angry with her, too, for doing this?”
    “I don’t like the idea of anybody using money to set someone else to die for them.”
    “I’m still alive,” Jane King pointed out.
    “I think you’ve just been lucky,” Durell said.

    Daniel Donegan’s business as part-time K Section man for the CIA in Karachi was covered by the offices set up here as a branch of an economic development mission sponsored by the U.S. government. And wherever you go in the world, Durell thought, Washington’s bureaucracy managed to take seed and adapt itself and yet look the same. There were the civil service typists with disillusioned faces in the outer offices, the expensive electronic office equipment and standard green and gray filing cabinets and carefully apportioned desks of various sizes, according to status protocol and the hierarchy of civil service rank.
    Durell left Jane King in an outer room, seated in a leather chair next to a table covered by month-old copies of T ime, Life and the Post . The girl was docile now, accepting his orders without question. She sat meekly, hands folded, and nodded.
    “You’re not to leave