by Wilbur Smith
The third man was a Spaniard whose family name was synonymous with sherry, an urbane and courtly Don, but with that fierce Moorish rake to his thin features. Peter had read somewhere that the sherry and cognac ageing in this man’s cellars was valued at over five hundred million dollars, and that formed only a small part of his family’s investments. His wife was a darkly brooding Spanish beauty with an extraordinary streak of chalk white through the peak of her otherwise black hair.
As soon as the group had assimilated Peter, the talk turned back easily to the day’s sport. The Australian had boated a huge black marlin that morning, a fish over one thousand pounds in weight and fifteen feet from the point of its bill to the tip of its deep sickle tail, and the company was elated.
Peter took little part in the conversation, but watched Magda Altmann covertly. Yet she was fully aware of his scrutiny; he could see it in the way she held her hand, and the tension in her whole long slim body, but she laughed easily with the others and glanced at Peter only once or twice, each time with a smile, but the shadows were in the green depths of her eyes.
Finally she clapped her hands. ‘Come, everybody, we are going to open the feast.’ She linked arms with the senator and the Australian and led them down onto the beach. Peter was left to cope with the senator’s wife, and pushed her bosom against his upper arm and ran her tongue lightly over her lips as she clung to him.
Two of the Polynesian servants were waiting beside a long mound of white beach sand, and at Magda’s signal they attacked it with shovels, swiftly exposing a thick layer of seaweed and banana leaves from which poured columns of thick and fragrant steam. Below that was a rack of banyan wood and palm fronds which suspended the feast over another layer of seaweed and live coals.
There were exclamations of delight as the aroma of chicken and fish and pork mingled with those of breadfruit and plantains and spices.
‘Ah, a success,’ Magda declared gaily. ‘If any air is allowed to enter the bake we lose it all. It burns, poof! And we are left with only charcoal.’
While they feasted and drank the talk and laughter became louder and less restrained, but Peter made the single drink last the evening and waited quietly – not joining the conversation and ignoring the blandishments of the senator’s wife.
He was waiting for some indication of when and from what direction it would come. Not here, he knew, not in this company. When it came it would be swift and efficient as everything else that Caliph did. And suddenly he wondered at his own conceit, that had allowed him to walk, entirely unarmed and unsupported, into the arena selected and prepared by his enemy. He knew his best defence was to strike first, perhaps this very night if the opportunity offered. The sooner the safer, he realized, and Magda smiled at him across the table set under the palm trees and laden with enough food to feed fifty. When he smiled back at her, she beckoned with a slight inclination of her head, and then while the men argued and bantered loudly, she murmured an apology to the women and slipped unobtrusively into the shadows.
Peter gave her a count of fifty before he followed her. She was waiting along the beach. He saw the flash of her bare smooth back in the moonlight and he went forward to where she stood staring out across the wind-ruffled waters of the lagoon.
He came up behind her, and she did not turn her head but her voice was a whisper.
‘I am so glad you came, Peter.’
‘I am so glad you asked me to.’
He touched the back of her neck, just behind her ear. The ear had an almost elfin point to it that he had not noticed before and the unswept hair at her nape was silken under his fingertips. He could just locate the axis, that delicate bone at the base of the skull which the hangman aims to crush with the drop. He could do it with the pressure of thumb and it would be as quick as the knot.
‘I am so sorry about the others,’ she said. ‘But I am getting rid of them – with almost indecent haste, I’m afraid.’ She reached up over her shoulder and took his hand from her neck, and he did not resist. Gently she spread the hand, and then pressed the open palm to her cheek. ‘They will leave early tomorrow. Pierre is flying them back to Papeete, and then we will have Les Neuf Poissons to ourselves – just you and I—’ And then that husky little chuckle.’ – And thirty-odd servants.’
He could understand exactly why it would be that way. The only witnesses would be the faithful retainers of the Grande Dame of the islands.
‘Now we must go back. Unfortunately my guests are very important, and I cannot ignore them longer – but tomorrow will come Too slowly for me, Peter – but it will come.’
She turned in the circle of his arms and kissed him with a sudden startling ferocity, so his lips were crushed against his teeth, and then she broke from him and whispered close to his ear.
‘Whatever way it goes, Peter, we have had something of value, you and I Perhaps the most precious thing I have had in my life. They can never take that away from me.’
And then she was out of his arms with that uncanny speed and grace of movement and gliding back along the path towards the lights. He followed her slowly, confused and uncertain as to what she had meant by those last words, concluding finally that the purpose had been exactly that – to confuse and unbalance him, and at that moment he sensed rather than heard movement behind him, and instantly whirled and ducked.
The man was ten paces behind him, had come like a leopard, silently from the cover of a fall of lianas and flowering creepers beside the path; only some animal instinct had warned Peter – and his body flowed into the fighting stance, balanced, strung like a nocked arrow, at once ready both to attack and meet attack.
‘Good evening, General Stride.’ Peter only just managed to arrest himself, and he straightened slowly but with each hand still extended stiffly at his side like the blade of a meat cleaver, and as lethal.
‘Carl!’ he said. So the grey wolves had been close, within feet of them, guarding their mistress even in that intimate moment.
‘I hope I did not alarm you,’ said the bodyguard – and though Peter could not see the man’s expression, there was a faint mockery in his voice. If there was confirmation needed, complete and final, this was it. Only Caliph would have need of a guard on a romantic assignment. Peter knew then beyond any doubt that either he or Magda Altmann would be dead by sunset the following evening.
Before going into the bungalow he made a stealthy prowling circuit of the bushes and shrubs that surrounded it. He found nothing suspicious but in the interior the bed had been prepared and his shaving gear cleaned and neatly rearranged. His soiled clothing had been taken for cleaning and the other clothing had been pressed and rearranged more neatly than his own unpacking. He could not therefore be certain that his other possessions had not been searched, but it was safe to presume they had. Caliph would not neglect such an elementary precaution.
The locks on doors and windows were inadequate, had probably not been used in years, for there had been no serpents in this paradise, not until recently. So he placed chairs and other obstacles in such a way that an intruder should stumble over them in the dark, and then he rumpled the bed and arranged the pillows to look like a sleeping figure, but took a single blanket to the long couch in the private lounge. He did not really expect an attempt before the other guests left the island, but if it came he would confuse Caliph’s scenario as much as possible.
He slept fitfully, jerking awake when a falling palm frond rattled across the roof, or the moon threw picture shadows on the wall across the room. Just before dawn he fell into a deeper sleep and his dreams were distorted and nonsensical, only the sharp clear image of Melissa-Jane’s terror-stricken face and her silent screams of horror remained with him when he woke. The memory roused in him the cold lust for vengeance which had abated a little in the weeks since her rescue, and he felt reaffirmed, possessed of a steely purpose once more, determined to resist the softening, fatal allure of Caliph.
He rose in the slippery pearl light of not yet dawn, and wen
t down to the beach. He swam out a mile beyond the reef, and had a long pull back against a rogue current, but he came ashore feeling good and hard and alert as he had not been in weeks.
All right, he thought grimly. Let it come. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.
There was a farewell breakfast for the departing guests, on the sugary sands of the beach that had been swept smooth by the night tide – pink Laurent Perrier champagne and hothouse strawberries flown in from Auckland, New Zealand.
Magda Altmann wore brief green pants that showed off her long shapely legs to perfection, and a matching ‘boob tube’ across her small neat breasts – but her belly and shoulders and back were bare It was the body of a finely trained athlete, but drawn by a great artist.
She seemed unnaturally elated to Peter, her gaiety was slightly forced and the low purring laughter just a little too ready – and with a saw-edge to it. It was almost as though she had made some hard decision, and was steeling herself to carry it through. Peter thought of them as true opponents who had trained carefully for the coming configuration – like prize fighters at the weigh-in.
After the breakfast they rode up in a cavalcade of electric carts to the airfield. The senator, rewed-up with pink champagne and sweating lightly in the rising heat, gave Magda an over-affectionate farewell, but she skilfully avoided his hands and shunted him expertly into the Tri-Islander after the other passengers.
Pierre, Magda’s pilot, stood on the brakes at the end of the runway while he ran all three engines up to full power. Then he let her go, and the moment she had speed he rotated her into a nose-high obstacle-clearance attitude. The ungainly machine jumped into the sky and went over the palms at the end of the short strip with five hundred feet to spare – and Magda turned to Peter ecstatically.
‘I hardly slept last night,’ she admitted, as she kissed him.
‘Neither did I,’ Peter told her – and then he added silently’ – for the same reasons, I’m sure.’
‘I’ve planned a special day for us,’ she went on. ‘And I don’t want to waste another minute of it.’
The head boatman had Magda’s big forty-five-foot Chris-craft Fisherman singled up at the end of the jetty. It was a beautiful boat, with long low attacking lines that made it seem to be flying even when on its mooring lines, and loving care had very obviously been lavished upon it. The paintwork was unmarked and the stainless steel fittings were polished to a mirror finish. The boatman beamed happily when Magda commended him with a smile and a word.
‘Tanks are full, Baronne. The scuba bottles are charged and the light rods are rigged. The water-skis are in the main racks, and the chef came down himself to check the icebox.’
However, his wide white smile faded when he learned that Magda was taking the boat out alone.
‘Don’t you trust me?’ she laughed.
‘Oh, of course, Baronne—’ But he could not hide his chagrin at having to give over his change—even to such a distinguished captain.
He handled the lines himself, casting her off, and calling anxious last-minute advice to Magda as the gap between jetty and vessel opened.
‘Ne t’inquiet pas!’ she laughed at him, but he made a dejected figure standing on the end of the jetty as Magda slowly opened up both diesels and the Chris-craft came up on the plane and seemed almost to break free of the surface. Her wake was scored deep and clean and straight through the gin-clear water of the lagoon, a tribute to the design of her hull, and then it curved out gracefully behind them as Magda made the turn between the channel markers and lined her up for the passage through the reef, and out into the open Pacific.
‘Where are we going?’
‘There is an old Japanese aircraft carrier lying in a hundred feet of water beyond the reef. Yankee aircraft sank her back in ’forty-four – It is a beautiful site for scuba diving. We will go there first—’
How? Peter wondered. Perhaps one of the scuba bottles had been partially filled with carbon monoxide gas. It was simply done, with a hose from the exhaust of the diesel generator. simply pass the exhaust gases through a charcoal filter to remove the taste and smell of unconsumed hydrocarbons and the remaining carbon monoxide gas would be undetectable. Fill the bottle to 30 atmospheres of pressure then top it up with clean air to its operating pressure of 110 atmospheres. It would be swift, but not too swift to alarm the victim, a gentle long sleep. When the victim lost his mouthpiece, the bottles would purge themselves of any trace of the gas. That would be a good way to do it.
‘After that we can go ashore on Île des Oiseaux. Since Aaron stopped the islanders stealing the eggs to eat, we’ve got one of the biggest nesting colonies of tems and noddies and frigate birds in the Southern Pacific—’
Perhaps a speargun. That would be direct and effective. At short range, say two feet, even below the surface, the spear arrow would go right through a human torso – in between the shoulder blades and out through the breast bone.
‘– And afterwards we can water-ski—’
With an unsuspecting skier in the water, awaiting the pick-up, what could be more effective than opening up both those tremendously powerful diesels to the gates and running the victim down? If the hull did not crush him, the twin screws turning at 500 revolutions per minute would cut him up as neatly as a loaf of pre-sliced bread.
Peter found himself intrigued with the guessing-game. He found himself regretting the fact that he would never know what she intended, and he looked back from where they stood side by side on the tall flying bridge of the Chris-craft. The main island was lowering itself into the water; already they were out of sight of anybody who did not have a pair of powerful binoculars.
Beside him Magda pulled the retaining ribbon out of her hair, and shook loose a black rippling banner that streamed in the wind behind her.
‘Let’s do this for ever,’ she shouted above the wind and the boom of the engines.
‘Sold to the lady with the sexy backside,’ Peter shouted back, and he had to remind himself that she was one of the most carefully trained killers he would ever meet. He must not allow himself to be lulled by the laughter and the beauty – and he must not allow her to make the first stroke. His chances of surviving that were remote.
He glanced back again at the land. Any minute now, he thought, and moved as though to glance over the side, getting slightly into her rear, but still in the periphery of her vision; she shifted slightly towards him still smiling.
‘At this state of the tide there are always amberjack in the channel. I promised the chef I would bring him a couple of them kicking fresh,’ she explained. ‘Won’t you go down and get two of the light rods ready, chéri? The feather lures are in the forward starboard seat locker.’
‘Okay,’ he nodded.
‘I’ll throttle back to trolling speed when I make the turn into the channel – put the lines in then.’
‘D’accord.’ And then on an impulse. ‘But kiss me first.’
She held up her face to him, and he wondered why he had said that. It was not to take farewell of her. He was sure of that. It was to lull her just that fraction, and yet as their lips met he felt the deep ache of regret that he had controlled for so long and as her mouth spread slowly and moistly open under his, he felt as though his heart might break then. For a moment he felt that he might die himself before he could do it; dark waves of despair poured over him.
He slid his hand over her shoulder to the nape of her neck and her body flattened against his; he caressed her lightly, feeling for the place, and then settling thumb and forefinger – a second, another second passed, and then she pulled him back softly.
‘Hey, now!’ she whispered huskily. ‘You stop that before I pile up on the reef.’
He had not been able to do it with his bare hands He just could not do it like that – but he had to do it quickly, very quickly. Every minute delayed now led him deeper and deeper into deadly danger
‘Go!’ she ordered, and struck him a playful blow on the chest ‘We’ve
got time for that later – all the time in the world. Let’s savour it, every moment of it.’
He had not been able to do it, and he turned away It was only as he went down the steel ladder into the cockpit of the Chris-craft that it suddenly occurred to him that during the lingering seconds of that kiss the fingers of her right hand had cupped lovingly under his chin. She could have crushed his larynx, paralysing him with a thumb driven up into the soft vulnerable arch of his throat at the first offensive pressure of his thumb and forefinger.
As his feet hit the deck of the cockpit another thought came to him. Her other hand had lain against his body, stroking him softly under the ribs. That hand could have struck upwards and inwards to tear through his diaphragm – his instincts must have warned him. She had been poised for the stroke, more so than he was; she had been inside the circle of his arms, inside his defences, waiting for him – and he shivered briefly in the hot morning sun at the realization of how close he had been to death.
The realization turned instantly to something else, that slid down his spine cold as water down a melting icicle. It was fear, not the crippling fear of the craven, but fear that edged him and hardened him. Next time he would not hesitate—he could not hesitate.
He was instinctively carrying out her instructions as his mind raced to catch up with the problem. He lifted the lid of the seat locker. In the custom-fitted interior were arranged trays of fishing gear, swivels of brass and stainless steel in fifty different sizes; sinkers shaped for every type of water and bottom; lures of plastic and feathers, of enamel and bright metal; hooks for gigantic bill fish or for fry – and in a separate compartment in the side tray a bait knife.
The knife was a fifty-dollar Ninja with a lexan composition handle, chequered and moulded for grip. The blade was seven inches of hollow ground steel, three inches broad at the hilt and tapering to a stiletto point. It was a brutal weapon, you could probably chop through an oak log with it, as the makers advertised. Certainly it would enter human flesh and go through bone as though it were Cheddar cheese.