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you, sooner or later, in some crisis or emergency. Or you might have to leave me somewhere, with no way out. To die, you understand?”
    Her face was pale. “I couldn’t do that to you.”
    “But I would, to you,” he said harshly. “I’d have to. And if you wanted to live in this game, you’d have to do the same to me.”
    “No,” she said. “No, no.”
    He stood up. “There you are. That’s what I mean.” Deirdre searched his lean, dark face and shivered and hugged herself as if she had suddenly gone cold because of what she saw in him. She was so beautiful that he ached all over for her.
    At that moment there came a sharp, snapping report from outside the quiet house. Durell’s move was so swift and fluid that Deirdre was hardly aware of his movement as such at all, until he was at the window, a bit to one side, with his hand in his pocket.
    It was only a backfire from the pungy’s engine in the cove. He did not relax.
    “You’re jumpy, Sam. What is it? What did McFee want?” “I’ve got to find a man,” he said. “Someone got loose in the country. He’s got to be found, fast.”
    “Or what?”
    “Or he’ll kill somebody. Somebody very important.” And Korvuth will try for you, too , Durell thought. But he didn’t tell her that. “I’ll have to leave you now, hon,” he said.
    “I suppose there is no point in asking you to be careful,” she whispered.
    “I do what has to be done. It’s my job,” he said.

    Dickinson MeFee was at the little airport two miles west of the town of Prince John. The rain was colder, half sleet now, and the trees in the grim gray daylight were beginning to glimmer with a thin coating of ice. A four-seater Beach liaison plane, with private registry markings, was waiting for him. Durell did not know the pilot. He met General McFee in a small shelter hut a short distance from the battered old hangar.
    “Sorry to break up your weekend like this, Sam.” McFee looked tired, a small erect man of gray, with a mouth and voice possessed of the incisive quality of a steel trap. “I hope Deirdre didn’t mind too much. Did you tell her I gave a negative on her application?”
    “Yes. Thanks.”
    “All right, then. I have to go to London tomorrow. You’ll be in charge of K Section for a week. Take it easy. Sidonie will hold down your desk for you at Twenty Annapolis. Whatever synthesizing has to be done, she’ll do it. Holcomb will run the rest of the office and attend the weekly briefings with State, and tomorrow’s briefings with Joint Chiefs. That gives you some free time for Bela Korvuth.”
    “You said over the phone he left word with some farmer that he was going to gun for me.”
    “Yes. Does it worry you?”
    Durell smiled. “I’d be a fool if it didn’t. But it’s not quite the way you think.”
    “No? Well, I’m taking it seriously, too. I’m going to put a couple of men to watch Deirdre. She won’t know they’re around, but we don’t want anything happening to her, and a man like Bela Korvuth may decide to hit you from any direction. There’s your grandfather, too, down in Bayou Peche Rouge. Not much chance of Korvuth getting down there, but you never can tell. There’s no point in guessing how much they know about you in the AVO and MGB offices. Not since the Stella Marni case, anyway. We’ve got to assume they know as much about you in their dossiers as we’ve got on Bela Korvuth, which may even the odds a bit. I don’t know. We’ll have to play it by ear.”
    “One thing I don’t understand,” Durell said. “Korvuth is a professional. He’s been in the game longer than I. This whole thing is too easy. He didn’t have to come over here disguised as a Hungarian refugee. A dozen other ways would have been better for him. And nobody in the business would deliberately break his own cover by talking to a local farmer about his mission. It doesn’t make sense.”
    McFee sighed and nodded and looked out through the small window of the