Assignment - Mara Tirana by Edward S. Aarons

bathroom, stripped off his shirt and tie, and ran cold water in the basin, where he had plunged his head under the reviving tap, he felt better. He would have liked a drink, but he had no liquor in the room. He stared at himself in the mirror and saw an unfamiliar pallor in his lean face, a look of alarm that turned his blue eyes dark, almost black. He looked dangerous. He ran cold water methodically over his wrists, looked at his injured elbow and decided it was nothing more than a deep bruise. Dressed again, he searched for the gun that Kopa had knocked from his hand.
    It was under the bed, where it had fallen when he lost it. Apparently Otto’s man in the next room had raised such a loud alarm that Kopa hadn’t had time to retrieve it.
    He looked at his watch. It was five after ten.

    He took every precaution when he left the hotel, doubling and redoubling on his trail to Otto’s “safe house.” He used the stairway instead of the elevator, walked through the kitchen into the back street, crossed over behind the huge Opera House, and mingled with a crowd in front of a cinema. He was not unaware of the danger of assassination now. But his maneuvers were successful. By the time he reached the town house at Steubenstrasse 19, he knew he had not been followed.
    Otto quickly let him in. His short-cropped gray hair looked almost white against his pink face and gold-rimmed spectacles. From a vest pocket over his small paunch he took out a folded, typewritten sheet of paper. “You -were not followed, Herr Durell?”
    “I was careful. What have you got there?”
    “The data on Kopa and Mara Tirana. Do you want it now?”
    Durell nodded and took the dossiers from the Austrian. There was a full summary on the man known as Kopa. As he suspected, Kopa was the code name for a Colonel Pavel Yudinov, of the KGB branch of State Security. On the neatly typed sheet was a typical history of such a man: born in 1921, in a remote Ukrainian village, son of peasants who fortunately escaped the classification of “kulaks,” he had been a member of the Young Pioneers and then a Komsomolets until the war, when he became a junior lieutenant political officer assigned to a mortar brigade of the 198th Division. His war record indicated three wounds, two received in the desperate battles before Moscow against the invading Nazis, another at Stalingrad. Party Card No. 4234498, dated May 10, 1946. After the war he was promoted to senior lieutenant and transferred to Moscow to the Personnel Directorate of the KGB, trained at the SMERSH Counter-Intelligence School on Stanislavskaya Street in Moscow, advanced to major in the Second Main Directorate of the Security Office Committee, which dealt with foreign intelligence. From there he had been posted to East Berlin, did a brief tour of duty in London, and another in Vienna in the Spetsburo. No notations had been made on the dossier for the past year, however, except that of his promotion to colonel.
    There was one further brief note: “This man is known to have killed two prisoners held for interrogation with one blow of his fist. His nickname among associates is The Sledge.”
    Durell looked up at Otto’s pale face.
    “This is no ordinary case-officer in the KGB, Otto. Not a usual foot-slogger.”
    “No,” Otto said. “He is too important for that.” Durell nodded. “What about the girl?”
    There was much less on Mara Tirana. Age 26, bom in Budapest, arrested in the uprising of the Hungarians and transported for a three-month term in the MVD Lefortovo Prison. There was no note about a younger brother named MiMly, but this did not necessarily mean he did not exist. There was a questioned statement about possible training at SMERSH Headquarters, a suggestion that she had been inducted for foreign espionage in the KGB as a result of personal blackmail, not an unusual method for recruiting agents. There was another note that she had been assigned routine case work in Paris under “Kopa.” And