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that sort of work. I guess he did the job on Fingal—cutting away the eyelids, emasculating 'him, all that. Mortimer tends to go overboard. It wasn’t a wandering band of brigands who caught Fingal. It was you three.” He turned to the girl. “Anya, did you enjoy watching what Mort did to Fingal?”
    She said, “My name is Annie.” There was sudden alarm in her eyes. She looked at Anderson. “What’s the matter with him, anyway? Doesn’t he believe us?”
    Anderson said, “He knows.”
    Durell said, “ Tovarich , you mentioned the Philadelphia Flyers not winning the pennant. They’re not a baseball team. They’re an ice hockey team. No pennants for them. Just the Stanley Cup. You had good training, fairly good schooling. But not good enough.”
    He drew a deep breath. “You’re Russian. Soviet agents. All three of you.”
5
    Mortimer made a hissing sound. Durell watched him with only part of his attention. The man was excitable and vicious, but it was apparent that Anderson gave the orders. Durell was a cautious man, but not one who refused risks. He had not made the statement that exposed Anderson’s cover without thought.
    “We have to kill him,” Mort Jones said.
    “No,” said Annie.
    Anderson said, “Not yet.” He looked curiously at Durell. “You don’t really know why you are here, do you? They have not briefed you completely?”
    “I’d like to know why you are here,” Durell said. “The Soviets have interests along the Afghani border, of course: So do the Chinese. But this masquerade? This searching for artifacts in the desert? Was it worth Fingal’s life?” He looked at Mortimer Jones’s sweaty face in the moonlight. “And do you usually work with such freaks, Anderson? Jones is not competent.” He switched suddenly, easily, to Russian. “Jones should be eliminated, not I.” Invective, foul and not distinguished by its inventiveness, poured from Jones like trash flowing along a sewer. Durell heard the girl draw a deep, weary breath. But most of his attention was centered on Anderson. The danger would come from that one; Anderson would make the decision. He did not know why they had performed their convoluted charade; it didn’t matter, at the moment. Just now, it was enough to consider the simple matter of survival.
    Durell had a knife in a sheath fastened to the inner seams of his shirt collar at the nape of his neck. It could be pulled out hilt-first, fitting the palm of his hand in throwing position in split seconds. They had not searched him, except to take the .38, which Anderson had thrust into his wide belt. Durell had been trained in the use of the narrow, vicious blade at the Maryland “Farm” run by K Section, but he decided in that moment not to use it unless they tried to go over him more thoroughly.
    Anderson moved his gun slightly. “We go down, Go-spodin Durell.” He jerked his head toward the man called Jones.
    “Why? What’s down there?”
    Jones grinned. “Perhaps the end of your career, Cajun. Yes, we know your code name. It’s been in our files for a long, long time. With a red tab attached to it. Which means, as you of course must know, that you are to be handled with extreme prejudice, as I believe your own official phrasing puts it.”
    The girl said, “But perhaps he can help us.”
    “Oh, he will, he will.” Jones’s round head bobbed in pleasant agreement. “This man is a professional, unlike Fingal, who waited too long before wagging his tongue. This man will be more sensible. He is a capitalist mercenary, fighting against the peoples’ revolutions. But he is also a pragmatic man, and he will not permit us to go as far as we had to go with Fingal.”
    Anderson gestured to the ravine. “Go on down.”
    Durell started forward to the goat track that led to the rocky bottom and the ruined, ancient village, He saw the flicker of an order in Anderson’s eyes, an imperceptible nod, and the moment that Anderson used to look at Mortimer Jones was