Free Peking & The Tulip Affair by Nick Carter Page B

to dress. He had just received word that the laboratory was no more. Burned to the ground. Stryker would have to know sooner or later. But how would the man react? Would he stick with him or desert?
    He strapped a wide leather belt with a holster about his waist He made sure his Luger was loaded and went out.
    With the laboratory gone, work on Agent Z would have to start all over again, from the very beginning. He wondered why Kerner hadn't called himself. The caller had been rather vague. There had been something about a white man attempting to invade the compound, of being captured, and then being put to death. Shortly after that, the laboratory had caught fire. The caller had been one of the Chinese officers assigned to the compound.
    Bormann walked into his office to find Sim Chan sitting calmly in a leather-backed chair, her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. She had on a short leather jacket over a tight-fitting dress. He bowed stiffly and sat down behind his desk.
    Sim Chan looked with distaste at the masklike face. "My thought, as I drove to Peking from the laboratory, was to confront you with your treachery, Herr Bormann, and loll you." She let her cigarette drop, and ground it out with the sole of her shoe. Her right hand slipped into the pocket of her leather jacket.
    "Treachery?"
    Was the man mocking her? "Yes, treachery," she hissed. "You have no intention of turning Agent Z over to my people."
    "Where did you learn this nonsense?"
    "From Kerner himself. He gave himself away." Then she smirked. "It was just before I killed him."
    Bormann s back grew rigid as plaster. "Walther Kerner is dead? Then Agent Z has died with him."
    "What are you talking about?" she snapped.
    "The laboratory has burned to the ground," he informed the Chinese girl. "It is no more. No laboratory, no papers, no Agent Z."
    "The formulas we used are in my head," she said.
    Bormann stared at her as if seeing her for the first time. "Just who are you, Sim Chan?"
    "Are you that stupid?" she spat. "I am an Intelligence agent as well as a scientist. I became Kerner's mistress only to keep an eye on him."
    Bormann seemed to relax on the swivel chair. "Then we have need for each other, Sim Chan. You are wrong about me. Perhaps Kerner had his own ideas about Agent Z. I don't know. I never tried to crawl into his mind to find out what he was thinking. I, too, believed he was loyal to
our
cause. If he betrayed you, he also betrayed me."
    "You are too clever, Herr Bormann." Sim Chan studied the man with thoughtful eyes. "You may be telling the truth, but I doubt it. Time will tell."
    "We must trust each other if we are to accomplish our main objective," he told her patronizingly. "You are an intelligent woman. If we fight each other we accomplish nothing except, perhaps, our own destruction." He took a cigarette from an ivory box on his desk and lit it with a heavy silver lighter. "Who was this white man who was captured last night?"
    "An American. He didn't give his name. We used Agent Z on him for experimental purposes, and he died. There is still something wrong with the formula. Before Kerner injected the American with Agent Z he gave out with a pretty speech about how he and his German friends were going to take over Germany. When the American's body was taken away, I confronted Kerner. The fool tried to kill me, thinking all women are weak. It was he who ended up dead."
    "You know nothing of the fire?"
    "No, nothing. I ordered my car and drove here to… talk to you."
    "That fire couldn't have been an accident," Bormann decided. "It had to be the American."
    "He was dead," Sim Chan insisted.
    "Was he?" Bormann spewed out blue-gray smoke. "Describe the American."
    Sim Chan described the man she and Kerner had used the drug on, and Bormann was convinced it was Nick Carter.
    "Whoever he was," Sim Chan argued, "he's now dead."
    "It wasn't his ghost who burned the laboratory to the ground," Bormann said patiently.
    Sim Chan stubbornly stuck to her guns.