Assignment - Ankara by Edward S. Aarons

father.” “Roberto? No, it’s just that—I made a lot of mistakes today. I thought I was so clever—and I only succeeded in getting beaten up within an inch of my life. I’ll never forget it. Never.” She shuddered with the memory of the savage attack. “Did you find my gun outside, Sam?”
    “No.”
    “Then he must have taken it.”
    “Who was it, Francesca? Who attacked you like that? And why?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know, and—” She paused, looked at him with careful, slanted gray eyes. “How do I know who you really are, Sam? We all seem to travel under false colors here. None of us are what we claim, are we?” “And what are you, really?” he asked grimly.
    “I can’t tell you—yet.”
    “Don’t you trust me?”
    “I want to, but—I’m afraid, I guess.”
    She turned her face away from him and began to cry again.

    Even as she wept, her behavior caused frustration and dismay. She did not understand herself. She had never felt like this before. Always in the past she had been complete, aloof from the troubles of others. Roberto once had called her a cold and beautiful bitch, sterile and heartless. But she did her work well, efficiently and alone. There was satisfaction in using her courage and wits against the enemy, as she thought of it. But she knew her detachment was a fault, although until now it hadn’t troubled her; she’d been quite satisfied with herself.
    Now everything was shaken and changed.
    She had groveled in the dirt, shrinking in terror from the degradation of savage blows, and she had felt the chill of sure death approach her. An intimation of mortality, she thought grimly. The pain had debased her, reducing her in those poisoned moments to one vast, quaking heartbeat, no better or worse than anyone else in the world.
    Her body still ached with her bruises, but she was warm and reasonably comfortable now, and she looked up at Durell with a touch of wonder. She wanted to trust him. She felt alone for the first time in her life. She needed someone now, and yet—
    He had been gone a long time. Maybe with Susan—
    She was surprised at the twist of jealousy she felt. Durell was different from all the other men she had known. There was a reserve about him, an objectivity in his dark eyes when he looked at her. She shivered inwardly, but it was not unpleasant, being watched this way.
    “Sam?” she whispered. She smiled. “I’m hungry.”
    “We all are. But there’s very little good for any of us here.”
    “Being hungry means I feel better, though, doesn’t it?”
    “Yes. I’m glad. You had a close call.”
    She lifted herself on the bed. “I wish—we could be alone for a little while. Not here.” Her gray eyes tilted up at him. “But somewhere.”
    “Some time,” he nodded. “Perhaps.”

    Susan Stuyvers lay stiffly on the bed in the adjacent hut, acutely aware of John sprawled in a chair across the room. Something in her had changed. She hadn’t told John about her encounter with Durell, and it was the first time since he had saved her, out on the Lebanese desert, that she had kept anything from him; and in a way, this frightened and excited her, all at the same time.
    She lay still, moving the palm of her hand slowly against her cheek. In the pale light of the lantern, she saw John stir, breathing gustily, and she smelled the staleness of the Anatolian brandy he had been drinking with Colonel Wickham. Her sense of his strange fanaticism echoed strongly, like the movement of fear within her, and she wondered about it. She felt different, as if her life had suddenly moved into another cycle, a new direction. It was Durell, she thought. He had done it, and she was like a moth attracted to a deadly flame. John would never allow it. But she felt as if it was irresistible. Durell was different because he could make her do whatever he asked, out of strength and conviction; and she thought of this and wondered how it would be, to belong to such a man, after