Assignment - Lowlands Read Online Free PDF Page A

technicians.”
    “It should have been kept buried,” O’Keefe whispered. “Well, it wasn’t. Have you got everything straight now?”
    “I’ll be there by midnight. . . . Sam?”
    “Yes?”
    “How do you feel?”
    “It doesn’t work that fast,” Durell said quietly.
    “But you were with Piet. You could have got it from him.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Are you scared? Honestly?”
    “Yes,” Durell said. “I’m damned scared.”
    He hung up.
Four
    Operation Cassandra had been in the files a long time.
    It was only a nightmare rumor, a poisonous old-wives’ tale, a relic of World War II.
    Along with unnamed and unimagined secret weapons, along with the V-l and V-2 rockets and the Peenemunde research base of the Nazi High Command, there was Operation Cassandra.
    Routine checking in Washington of crates of war records, the clerical residue of shiploads of material seized by the speeding spearheads of General Patton’s Third Army, uncovered Operation Cassandra.
    But it was still a rumored nightmare, a hint only of the unmentionable. It was death waiting to be unleashed, in a manner not seen since the Middle Ages. It was to be a grotesque and silent  Götterdämmerung , a quiet ending to all that mankind cherished.
    Cassandra was biological, germ warfare. Nothing new. It had existed for a long time in laboratories, in biological test tubes, a warping of the ultimate excuses for war, a negation of every normal and decent instinct in man, a representation of the Nazi philosophy. Cassandra should have been killed in the laboratory. Instead, she was nurtured and perfected. The deadly ampoules and vials were ready to be dropped on Great Britain’s cities and fields when the Allied spearheads sped into Holland and forced a wild and panicked retreat by the Germans.
    The base where Cassandra had grown in her molds and flats of slime was reported as destroyed.
    But there was a question.
    Destroyed?
    The records unearthed by Washington were vague. One suggested the deliberate sealing of a bunker that contained all the records, and the heavy waterproof safes racked with vials of Cassandra cultures. The virus had no enemy, could not be seen or counted, and caused death from apparent massive coronary constrictions in twenty-four hours. But other records implied that the underground laboratory had been flooded when the retreating Germans sabotaged Holland’s dikes and vengefully let in the tides of the cold North Sea.
    The northern coasts of Germany and Holland, the West and East Frisian Islands, and the drowned polders of Groningen and Friesland were scoured quietly and efficiently. Nothing was found. No bunkers. No laboratory. No hint of the germ-warfare research the records showed during the Nazi Occupation.
    Then file it and forget it. It was only a rumor and a nightmare, a ragtag end of terror propaganda.
    If the place was destroyed, so was the virus.
    It doesn’t exist.
    So code it, file it, forget it.
    And nothing happened for another ten years.

    A week before the K Section alert, an anonymous letter arrived at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, offering six test vials of the Cassandra virus for sale to the United States, or to the NATO defense organization, for the sum of five million dollars in a cash deposit in an anonymously numbered account in the Banque Populaire Suisse in Geneva. Further details of this first letter were lost because the aide who opened it in routine fashion labeled it for the crank file, where it was dropped into the incinerator forty-eight hours later.
    The next note included the news clipping from the provincial Dutch newspaper that Durell had seen, mentioning a small but serious outbreak of extremely virulent infection in the fishing village of Doorn on the island of Scheersplaat in the East Frisians. A copy of the demand went to the State Department in Washington.
    The file on Cassandra was reopened.
    Dutch, British and American intelligence records were scoured. The West