Assignment - Mara Tirana by Edward S. Aarons

asked.
    She coughed and made an inarticulate sound. “He took your girl,” she whispered. “They will be in Czechoslovakia by now.”
    “How did Kopa plan to get there?”
    “He had another boat waiting—a mile downstream.”
    Durell gestured toward the tall young sailor. “Why didn’t Kopa wait for this one, too, Mara? Gija has what Kopa wants to know about the American spaceman, Major Stepanic.”
    “He was frightened off. I—I frightened him.”
    “How? Why?”
    “I could not endure it,” the blonde girl said. She looked down. “Please untie me. I am your friend. Please believe me.”
    “Who hit you?”
    “It was Kopa.” And then she began to cry, in great racking sobs. Gija looked at her with astonishment. Durell could have taken him then, wresting the Magnum from him. But he was thinking fast, far ahead. There was Deirdre’s kidnapping to consider, and Harry Hammett’s mission. He didn’t want to antagonize the bargeman. Too many things had gone wrong already to add any unnecessary complications. “I couldn’t bear it,” Mara was whispering. “I do not wish to hurt anyone. But Kopa was suspicious, because you and I were talking in your hotel room. He demanded to know what we were saying. But I simply told him you had caught me searching there, as he had instructed me to do; and that his arrival saved me. He did not believe me entirely.” She paused and looked up, her eyes filled with bright tears. There was a naivete in her that somehow was convincing. “I cried out a warning to Harry Hammett and the girl who was with him. Kopa won out anyway, killing Mr. Hammett. Then he struck me. I was unconscious.” She touched her injured scalp wonderingly. “Then this sailor caught me as I tried to crawl away across the field. I think Kopa left me believing I was dead. But he has Miss Padgett now. And he is taking her into Czechoslovakia.”
    “You’re sure of that?”
    She nodded slowly. “It is part of his plan to capture you on Soviet territory, so you can be executed without any international fuss.”
    “Using Deirdre, as bait, to get me into his hands?” 
    “Yes. Exactly.”
    “Do you know where he intends to keep Deirdre a prisoner?”
    “Yes. In Moralova Castle. A few miles east of Bratislava.”
    Durell stared at her. Everything could have been arranged—the girl’s head wound, her apparent willingness to defect to the West, her spilling of information that might be intended to lead him precisely where Kopa wanted him to go. He did not know what to do. He did not trust Mara now.
    There was no time to pass this information to Otto Hoffner, waiting in the dark field above. In any case, the decision was taken from him when Gija raised his gun abruptly, looked at his watch, and said: “Come, we will all go. We have no more time for talk.”
    “Go where?” the girl asked wonderingly.
    “Back east.” Gija grinned at her. “I'm sorry, beautiful, but we can’t leave you in Austria. You might betray our underground organization, now that you’ve seen me and know about the barge, Luliga . Captain Galucz will have to decide about you. Maybe he’ll simply drop you into the river.” Mara turned in desperate appeal to Durell, who said: “Then you’re going back to your barge?”
    “As planned. I promised I’d bring an American to help Stepanic, and I will. You’re as good as anyone, maybe better than Hammett, seeing he didn’t get very far, eh? So you come in his place. And we take the blonde tear bomb with us. We sail in the hour.”
    Durell hesitated only a moment. Gija was his only contact with which to reach Stepanic. With Hammett dead, the chance of getting Stepanic safely out of hostile territory might be lost forever, if someone didn’t go on the barge now.
    But there was Deirdre.
    He had to assume responsibility for taking over Harry Hammett’s mission now, since his call from Washington. But Deirdre was a problem he could not immediately solve. He had to make a choice. His