Assignment - Karachi Read Online Free PDF

young Pakistan soldier on guard at the villa’s iron gate. “Ali, is Colonel K’Ayub about?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Every second Moslem here is called Ali,” the Englishman said, as if the soldier could not understand him. “These Shiites consider Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth Caliph to succeed Mohammed, as their most important Imam, or leader.”
    Durell got out of the Land Rover. “Thanks for the lift.” “Any time,” the Englishman said. “Good luck, old man.” Durell looked at the pale wife, but she was still silent and unsmiling. He went in through the gate, nodding as the soldier saluted, and walked up the steps into the house.
    Durell had to call upon another kind of patience to sustain him. Eight hours had gone by since his plane had touched down at the Karachi airport. He had been expected immediately at this big, cool, expensive house, and had not shown up, nor had the jeep which was sent for him returned, with or without the driver. Yet there was an atmosphere of easy complacence that made him bite down on his anger and ignore his own exhaustion.
    The rooms were big, cool, air-conditioned. He felt his energy returning. Another uniformed soldier told him to wait in a European styled living room that seemed to be partly an office, and when Durell asked for water, a servant in white muslin promptly appeared with a thermos jug and a bowl of fruit. He drank sparingly while he waited, ate some figs, enjoyed the cool dry air blowing out of the air-conditioner grill.
    He waited five minutes, hearing voices dimly from somewhere else in the big house. No one had asked his identity or questioned the gun he carried. He waited another five minutes and then walked down a white tiled corridor and out through a sunny, Moorish doorway with ivory screening into a cool, shaded garden surrounded by a high cinder-block wall painted a pale gray.
    A man looked up at him from the table there.
    “Ah, Mr. Durell. I am sorry, I was finishing a report, you must truly forgive me—”
    “Colonel K’Ayub?”
    “Yes. We have been waiting for you. I recognize you from your description. What detained you?”
    “My plane landed eight hours ago,” Durell said.
    “It did? We thought perhaps you had missed it.”
    “You didn’t think to check the passenger list? Or wonder what happened to the driver you sent for me?”
    “We supposed he went to visit his family on Drigh Road, when you didn’t show up. He often does. He has my permission. Please be seated, Mr. Durell.”
    Durell remained on his feet. He did not like what he saw of Lathri K’Ayub. He had a soft face and a soft body and the pale yellow eyes of a lynx. It was Durell’s business to be suspicious, and he had reason to be; and he recalled that Henry Kallinger, in Istanbul, had not committed himself on the colonel’s reliability. K’Ayub had been eating mangoes from a brass plate, and he dabbed delicately at a bead of the juice that clung to his upper lip. There was a telephone on the delicately carved table where he sat.
    Lathri K’Ayub was part of a powerful political family in Pakistan, said to be ambitious for national expansion. Lathri had been educated at UCLA in California, had been an attache for a UN military mission in the Congo, and was part of a group that bloodily resisted all compromise with the Pathan’s struggle for independence. But his military rank had been earned the hard way—he had been in command of border patrol expeditions in the high Himalayas twice, and was said to be hard, tough and ruthless.
    Perhaps his soft face and soft body were deceiving.
    He said now, delicately, “You have had a difficult time, Mr. Durell? You have been out in the sun?”
    “I took a walk,” Durell said. He sat down and briefly recounted what had happened. Nothing changed in the other man’s lynx eyes. Halfway through Durell’s brief speech,
    Lathri K’Ayub held up a hand and used the telephone and spoke in rapid Urdu, ordering a search