Assignment - Karachi Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the jeep driver’s body. Durell finished quietly. “I am quite anxious about Miss Standish’s safety. Do you know where she is?” “Of course. I am so sorry about all this. I do not know how to apologize.”
    “Will you take me to Miss Standish, please?”
    “It is not necessary, Mr. Durell. She is my guest, here in this house.”
    He sent a hovering servant inside to find Sarah. Durell felt deflated. He had fought his way here along the beach with a sense of desperate urgency, a feeling of impending disaster that his mission was defeated even before he had begun. The quiet and peace of Lathri K’Ayub’s house was disarming.
    “And the von Buhlens?” he asked. “Rudi and Alessa?” “Quite safe. I spoke to them less than an hour ago. They plan to go ahead to Rawalpindi to make sure the new expedition’s supplies and porters are properly organized for the day of departure, day after tomorrow.”
    “And there is one more man—the guide, Hans Steicher. No attempt was made on any of their lives? No threats received, no danger?”
    “None, Mr. Durell.”
    “I find it difficult to believe.”
    Lathri K’Ayub seemed amused. Or something like amusement glittered in his tawny eyes. “We have made a bad beginning, you and I. Yet we must work together in the future, for some weeks, or a month or two, in guarding this expedition. My government is as interested in relocating this alleged nickel ore deposit on S-5 as yours—or Miss Standish’s personal financial empire. Yet we must be patient. We must trust each other, you and I.”
    Durell said nothing.
    “Oh perhaps you, too, believe in the legend or myth about a fabulously valuable crown that was stolen from Alexander the Great and lost on that mountain?”
    “Do you believe in it?” Durell countered.
    “My country is a land of many strangenesses. A place of the unexpected. Anything is possible. Our history reaches far beyond the Portuguese, beyond the Moguls who conquered in the 16th century, beyond even the Aryans who swept down from the northwest in 2000 B.C. to destroy the many older civilizations here in this valley of the Indus.
    There are ruins everywhere, constantly examined by experts. Old books, like the Rig-Veda, turn up clues in their lines of poetry that suggest old invasions, the tides of conquering peoples, hymns that recall assaults on the cities of the Indus. Time is without limit here, Mr. Durell. Time is full and heavy and ripe with old, old stories. Man is nothing. His ruins and decay are under the sands of the Sind wherever you choose to dig.”
    “You are an historian?” Durell asked.
    “Let us say that I am aware of my personal insignificance, in the tapestries of history. I know that nothing is impossible.”
    “Does the crown exist?”
    “Miss Standish believes so.”
    “Do you?”
    Lathri smiled. “My mission, like yours, is very practical. I must verify the presence of nickel ore on S-5.”
    The Pakistani stood up. He was as tall as Durell, who stood over six feet, but heavier with flesh, and slower and softer in movement. He smiled beyond Durell’s figure.
    “Ah. Miss Standish. Please do join us.”
    Durell turned and looked at the young woman who came out of the house and walked toward them through the shaded garden.
    She was not Sarah Standish.

chapter four
    SHE wore the same type of horn-rimmed glasses; but her eyes were pale blue, not gray. And her glance did not hold the cool objectivity and haughty remoteness that he remembered from past meetings. She looked frightened. She was a little shorter, perhaps a bit more fullbreasted, with a way of walking that not even Sarah’s tailored suit could hide. Her hair was the same, perhaps hastily tinted to match the rather pale sleek brown of Sarah’s, worn in the same severe fashion by having it pulled tightly back from a rounded brow into a prim, heavy knot at the nape of her neck. He thought, irrelevantly, that such a hairdo would surely be hot in Karachi’s climate.