Mrs. Pollifax Pursued Page 3

  "What happened?"

  Kadi was silent, remembering the shabby coffee shop, nearly empty, and how Sammy and his friend had sat across from her, and how she'd asked Sammy how his mother was.

  "He said 'She is very well, thank you, and how are your parents, Kadi? "

  She turned her face to Mrs. Pollifax and added quietly, "That really startled me, you see, because he knows very well that my parents are dead. He was trying to tell me something but I didn't know what, so I just asked how he liked college, and he asked me what had brought me to New Haven. A job interview, I said, but I didn't think I'd pleased them.

  "And then his roommate said 'Excuse me' and headed for the men's room and I was so relieved, and I said 'Sammy'—"

  She hesitated, her voice unsteady. "Right away Sammy placed a finger warningly to his lips, and then he reached under the table where Clarence had been sitting and brought out a tiny plastic object that had been attached there with a suction cup. Some kind of listening device."

  "An electronic bug," said Mrs. Pollifax, extremely interested now.

  Kadi nodded. "He put it back and then drew out a pencil and scrap of paper, and while I talked idiotically about the weather, and missing home, he wrote three words, and when he handed me the slip of paper it read NOT ROOMMATE— GUARD.

  "I just gaped at him, I mean I was terribly alarmed and awfully puzzled, too, but I shoved the note in my pocket and asked what courses he was taking at Yale and then I told him, 'Your roommate's returning, Sammy, he seems very nice.'

  "And then," she said shakily, "then Sammy reached inside his shirt and drew out—"

  She stopped, and Mrs. Pollifax glanced at her. "Yes?" she prodded.

  Steadying her voice Kadi said, "It was a ball of pink modeling clay, the kind you see in toy shops, the sort that children play with, or maybe an adult would use like worry beads. I didn't understand until he peeled away a tiny corner of it—to show me what it concealed. It was so valuable it made me gasp. And then his hand went under the table with it, I reached under the table, too, he placed it in my hand and 1 dropped it quickly in my pocket."

  Mrs. Pollifax said lightly, "And what was it he gave you?"

  She shook her head. "That's Sammy's secret, so I can't tell you, but I knew I couldn't stay any longer, I said I'd have to catch my bus now, and—and I went out, very worried, knowing something was wrong, and outside there was parked this white van with those crazy misspelled words Chigi Scap Metal. I began to walk the four blocks to the bus station but I'd not gone far when I realized the van was slowly following me."

  "Did they try to approach you?"

  "No, because I started to run and I raced into the bus station, the New York bus was there and filling with passengers so I climbed on it right away. But one of the men must have left the van to see where I was going because when the bus started for New York the van was behind it."

  "But you didn't go to New York," Mrs. Pollifax reminded her.

  In the light of the dashboard Kadi looked miserable. "No, I panicked. I thought they wanted to find out where I live, and I knew they mustn't. The bus stopped in Bridgeport and I thought of leaving it there but I was too scared, so I didn't, but then later we began passing houses and gardens, and I thought of asking the bus driver to please stop—and he did—because I run very fast. I thought I could lose them easily on foot."

  "Except you didn't."

  "No, and they almost caught me, the two men. One of them chased me through back yards, and if you hadn't been in your garden—" Her voice broke. "Now they're still after me, Mrs. Pollifax, and what are we going to do?"

  Mrs. Pollifax said calmly, "I don't know yet, but I have a full tank of gas, my car is very good on mileage, that green sedan looks quite old, a real 'gas guzzler,' and it's possible they may run out of gas before we do, and have to stop. I think we simply keep driving north and hope. But tell me, Kadi, in what country did you and Sammy grow up?"

  "Most people have never heard of it," she explained soberly. "It's in Africa. My parents were missionary-doctors, you see. It's a small country. It's called Ubangiba now."

  By half-past ten Mrs. Pollifax had grown tired of driving; Kadi had volunteered to help but she had no license, and in any case the green sedan remained resolutely behind them and Mrs. Pollifax did not care to risk the consequences if they stopped even for a moment. Noticing how tired Kadi looked by the light of the dashboard Mrs. Pollifax resisted making any more demands on her, and their conversation had become polite and desultory; she had learned how to say hello—moni—in the language of Ubangiba, and that Kadi was studying drawing and woodcarving at art school, but by now Mrs. Pollifax was definitely looking forward to a bed and some sleep after the day's rather disturbing encounters. She interrupted the silence to say firmly, "Obviously my theory about their running out of gas has been rapidly running out of possibility."

  "Yes," Kadi said politely.

  "And we need sleep."

  "Oh yes," agreed Kadi.

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded. "Somehow we've got to lose them, and it can't be done on a highway. A city is best, and I should have tried it miles ago." She pointed. "We're approaching Worcester, it could be risky. Are you game?"

  Kadi said with spirit, "How can you ask? The word bed is right now the loveliest word I can think of, I haven't slept in one since Sunday."

  Mrs. Pollifax gave her a quick glance and smiled. "Off we go then," she said, turning down the exit ramp. "I think we need a place for the night near the highway, in case a fast getaway becomes necessary. Nothing fancy, more like that," she said, pointing, as they passed a rundown motel with a bright neon sign proclaiming it the Bide-A-Wee. "We'll aim for that later."

  Having found a goal she now applied herself to losing the green sedan by driving up one street and down another, always taking care to remain in the neighborhood of the Bide-A-Wee lest she not find it again. They spent twenty-five minutes racing traffic lights before they turned red, except the green sedan disdainfully ignored the red traffic lights anyway, and continued to tailgate them until abruptly a small miracle occurred. Kadi said exultantly, "They've stopped! They've stopped, Mrs. Pollifax! The light turned red for them but this time there's a police cruiser behind them waiting for the light to change, and they had to stop!"

  Mrs. Pollifax sighed with relief. "Let's fervently hope we can find the Bide-A-Wee again, and quickly. I remember it having lots of parking space, too," she said, and several minutes later she was pulling into the parking lot beside the motel and maneuvering her car between two small pick-up trucks. "We'll ask for a room overlooking the car," she said firmly. "I shall insist."

  Presently they were ensconced in room 211, and while Kadi showered in the bathroom Mrs. Pollifax turned on the small television to a flickering screen and to a voice saying, "It has now been six days since Henry Bidwell was abducted, and if the police have any clues as to his abductors they are keeping them private... . Bidwell's wife is under a doctors care, and his employers are offering a reward of fifty thousand dollars to anyone with information as to his whereabouts. ... In Paris today, OPEC met again and the price of oil ..."

  Mrs. Pollifax snapped it off and sat down on the bed, longing for a toothbrush. Kadi came out of the bathroom and said, "It's your turn," and lay down on the opposite bed and promptly fell asleep. Mrs. Pollifax lay down on her own bed and then, perversely, found herself wide awake and not sleepy at all.

  I'm uneasy, she thought, frowning, but I've been uneasy aü day, why can't I sleep now? At last, long after eleven o'clock, she left her bed to stand at the window and gaze out at the lights of the city, her glance eventually moving to the street below, and finally to her car, and then across the street to the bright lights of a larger motel. She watched as a car drove into the entrance of the motel across the street, disappeared and soon emerged at the other side—circling it, realized Mrs. Pollifax, suddenly alert—and as the car drove toward the Bide-A-Wee it passed under a street light and it was a dark green sedan.

/>   Chilled, Mrs. Pollifax realized that Kadi's pursuers were methodically checking every motel in the area for her red car.

  There is something frighteningly important about this, she thought, they're merciless, what will they ever do to Kadi if they overtake her, what do they want of her?

  "Kadi," she said in a low voice, "Kadi, wake up, they're about to find us."

  The girl was on her feet at once. "Where?"

  "We've got to leave," Mrs. Pollifax told her. "And fast"

  Kadi was beside her, shrugging into her tweed jacket. Mrs. Pollifax picked up the phone and called the desk clerk. "We need a taxi, please—quickly—it's an emergency."

  "Emergency?" mumbled a sleepy voice.

  "We need a hospital—hurry!"

  The desk clerk, sufficiently aroused, said, "Cab—right, I'll call."

  "How long?"

  "Three to five minutes, I'd guess."

  She fervently hoped he guessed right.

  "What on earth," Kadi said, staring at her, open-mouthed.

  "You're having an attack of appendicitis," Mrs. Pollifax told her crisply. "Fetch your knapsack, I'll carry it down.... Walk bent over and clutching your stomach."

  "But why? What about your car?"

  "Take a look out the window," Mrs. Pollifax told her. "They're going to find it in about two minutes. No, they've already found it, they're shining a flashlight on the license plate."

  Kadi looked stricken. "Oh God."

  Mrs. Pollifax opened the door. "Quickly—lean on me. Be sick, Kadi."

  "I feel sick," gasped Kadi as they raced down the stairs.

  5

  It was half-past ten and Carstairs was working late in his office, quite alone; Bishop was presumably asleep or out nightclubbing. Carstairs had just completed the last of his work when the next day's Departmental bulletin could be heard arriving on his fax machine. He yawned and thought of ignoring it until morning, but after a moment's reflection he tore it from the machine and glanced through it. There was the usual review of progress—he skipped this—and with more interest turned to the Departmental FYI memos, which so often held juicy gossip and rumors from around the world. NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION, he read: FBI reports first attempt at delivering Bidwell ransom failed, unidentifiable sources report 50 million demanded . ..

  "Good old 'Unidentifiable Source,' " murmured Carstairs, but fifty million was a hell of a lot of money, in fact it had to set a record; someone found Bidwell of great value. His glance slid to Memo: MIDDLE EAST DEPT: Iran. Two Europeans reported arriving Teheran private plane, met by top government limo, i.d.'d by "friendly parties" as Yule Romanovitch, A. Lecler.

  Carstairs yawned again, put aside the bulletin and rose from his desk to go home when abruptly he sat down and picked up the Departmental bulletin again: the names Romanovitch and Lecler had struck him as vaguely familiar and he wondered why. Frowning, he leaned back in his chair and attempted an emptying of his mind, hoping the answer might spring from his subconscious as so frequently happened; in fact he sometimes found his subconscious more re-liable than Bishop's memos as he juggled three and four projects at a time.

  Got it! he remembered: the FBI inquiry on the kidnapped Bidwell. Springing from his chair he went to the files and there they were, the same names scrawled in the engagement book that Bidwell had kept locked in an office drawer, the same two men, surely, that Bidwell had met several times in Paris: Lecler and Romanovitch, like a vaudeville team.

  He wondered if Mornajay was still Upstairs in his office, and rang his number. Mornajay had left, however in Europe it was morning: he put in a call to Bernard at Interpol in Paris and was presently connected.

  "Bernard," he said, "I'd like to know what you might have, if anything, on a Yule Romanovitch and one Achille Lecler." Glancing over the list he added, "Also, a Rogere Desforges."

  "Hmmmm," murmured Bernard, "give me half an hour, will you? But I can tell you at once who Rogere Desforges is. You will find him easily enough in your Who's Who, he is one of our geophysicists, very well known."

  "Geophysicist," repeated Carstairs, frowning. "Right—get back to me, will you?"

  "Burning the candle?" suggested Bernard. "Or whatever the idiom is?"

  "That's right, Bernard, at both ends."

  Forty minutes later Carstairs received Bernard's return call. "What we have on these two men," he said, "is limited and murky. The two are middle-men, involved in a number of questionable deals, and probably more that are unknown to us. Lecler has a New York office as well as an office in Paris. In New York he is Lecler Consultants, in Paris he is L-V Investment Company. They operate just inside the law, barely, so that we've never been able to pin anything on them but we'd love to."

  "Interesting," said Carstairs. "Any known connection with terrorist groups?"

  "I'd say absolutely out of character," replied Bernard. "They're very suave and subtle, these two, but strictly non-political. To my knowledge they've never been associated with violence of that sort. Dirty deals, yes, but that's another category."

  Carstairs hesitated and then he said, "Would you hazard a guess as to why an American businessman would contact them separately, or together, a number of times on his visits to Paris?"

  "My friend," said Bernard, "I do not like to be overly suspicious but I would take a close look at whatever company your American businessman represents, which is—?"

  "A holding company," said Carstairs.

  "Ah yes, my friend, but does one know what it 'holds'? Such a splendid word, 'holding,' and your American laws are a little loose, are they not? But please, I do not wish to be so negative, yet still—"

  "I understand," Carstairs told him. "And thanks, Bernard."

  "You'll share? As I said—"

  "Definitely," Carstairs told him, "but for the moment it's mere curiosity and speculation." He hung up with a sigh. For all practical purposes he had reached a dead end, but still it remained odd, a man like Bidwell associating with two men of such dubious reputations that their dossiers were recorded at Interpol. He had learned little that interested him except for the fact that Rogere Desforges was a geophysicist.

  Geophysicist, he repeated, and scowled. There was something there. Not graspable yet, but lurking.

  He decided that it was time to learn more about this Ubangiba that had so interested Bidwell that he had made five trips there inside of four and a half months. He had told Bernard that his inquiry was mere curiosity and speculation but it was more than that: those blank pages in Bidwell's engagement calendar still bothered him, they did not fit a man whose life Addams had called an open book.

  Switching off phones and computers, he extinguished the lights in both offices, and with his coat under his arm headed for the Reference Room. Here, surrounded by atlases, directories, phone books, and updated files on every country in the world, he placed his coat over a chair and began by looking up Claiborne-Osborne International. The words syndicates and consortiums were prominent, and he ran his eyes down the list: foreign banks, oil-drilling, hydro-electric power, earth-moving machinery . ., active in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan . . , offices in Cairo and Paris, main office in New York.

  He reflected dryly that rather a lot of terrorist possibilities existed there, except that he had no idea why anyone would single out Henry Bidwell to kidnap. No link there.

  But there was one country missing from that list of Claiborne-Osborne's interests, and that was Ubangiba.

  Pulling out more books he came at last to an in-depth history of the country and began to read attentively. It seemed the area, now called Ubangiba, was first mentioned in 1783 by one Ebu Taylor, lone survivor of a Sahara caravan wiped out by the Tuareg. Rescued by a tribe called the Shambi, he was taken to "a pastoral land where the Shambi and Soto tribes lived in peace under the benign rule of a King Zammat."

  "Local myth," he read, "has it that centuries earlier a quarrel arose between Chief Mombolu of the Soto tribe, and Zammat, chief of the Shambi tribe. To avoid
war it was decided by the wisemen of the country that both men should be bound together in a room into which two poisonous snakes would be released, and in that manner the gods would decide which man would survive to be ruler of both tribes. It was Chief Mombolu who died, and Zammat whom the gods favored."

  Carstairs thought dryly, interesting way to run an election.

  "From that time on," he read, "the King's totem has been a pair of intertwined serpents, represented on both the sacred royal gold ring that only the King can wear, and later by the flag of the country, on which two serpents repose on a scarlet background."

  Carstairs skipped ahead to World War I, where Britain, rather against its will, inherited the country by the Treaty of Versailles.

  "The British effort to dethrone the King," he read, "roused violent protests from the people. Ultimately, a Parliament was allowed under the King; a railroad was built but never used, an attempt made at a cement factory that went bankrupt, the country fell into decay. The British maintained a consulate and gave minimal financial aid but basically the country was considered unrewarding. It continued as a Kingdom until King Zammat VIII, educated at Oxford, negotiated independence from the British and prepared his country for free election of a President.

  "At his death," it concluded, "the sacred royal gold ring disappeared, and because of this the tribes have since regarded with distrust the ensuing rulers, including King Zammat's popular son, who was the first and only elected President, but who died mysteriously five months later. According to the belief of the people, he was poisoned by two serpents angered by the loss of the sacred royal ring, and they have regarded this as the reason for their many misfortunes since then."

  And a good many misfortunes there had been, concluded Carstairs, noting the riots, droughts, and coups that followed. One more restless African country; obviously it was time to forget Ubangiba, yet he continued to stare at the map of the small elongated country, impoverished, threatened by drought, overlooked and forgotten, scarcely worth invasion by ambitious neighbors. What had been Claiborne-Osborne's interest in Ubangiba? Had Bidwell made enemies there?