by Nick Carter
"More wine? Perhaps a brandy?"
"Brandy. I think."
"Good."
Carter poured two heavy cut-glass goblets half full and passed one to her. As her jeweled fingers curled around the bowl of the goblet, her lips curled in crimson amusement.
"You have as large an appetite for drink as you do for good food. Nicholas."
"True." Carter said, sipping. "I am part Greek, part American, and all barbarian."
"And I've been told that you have an equal appetite for women."
"Also true."
Together, with Carter slightly behind at her shoulder, they moved into one of the bays.
"And am I to be just another of your conquests this evening?"
"I think, dear lady, that is entirely up to you," Carter said with a smile. "But — let me say this — I don't think anyone will ever conquer you."
"A few have tried," she said, rolling her head to the side and moving her shoulder back until their lips almost touched.
"I've heard. Your husbands, for instance. They all came to violent ends."
Again the flat smile, as deadly as it was amused. "You seem to know a great deal about me, Nicholas Carstocus, whereas I know very little about you."
"What would you like to know?"
"Well, for instance… what do you do besides host small, intimate dinner parties, drink good wine, and seduce women?"
Carter matched the cold amusement of her smile and used his eyes to bore through hers into the core of her soul.
"I kill people."
She blinked once, and other than the smile fading, there was no other sign that he had said anything at all out of the ordinary.
"As I noted at Alain's party, you are quite blunt."
Even more so now. We both know… ergo, why fence any longer?"
"When you kill… it is for money?"
"Not entirely. There is also the element of risk, the danger involved in hunting the ultimate quarry… man."
"Or woman?"
"Or woman."
Carter knew he was getting the better of the cat-and-mouse game, but she hid it well. A hand deftly moving her hair back from her face, a sip of the brandy, a quick glance at him only to roll her eyes back to the twinkling lights before them, all to formulate her next step, her next speech.
When she did speak, she turned first to face him directly. Carter sensed something new, almost predatory in her classic, aristocratic features and full mouth.
"I distrust adventurers, particularly those who place monetary gain as the bedrock of their actions."
Carter shrugged, not moving his eyes from hers. "You're entitled to your opinion. As for myself, I distrust ideologies and those who would blindly pursue them."
"Touché." She seemed to relax, even going so far as to reach out and run a long, ruby-red nail along Carter's cheekbone. "You are a fascinating man and, I understand, quite ingenious."
She moved slightly, just enough to press her cushiony breasts against his chest. The touch was electric, and Carter did not try to hide his reaction.
"I wonder what it would be like to have a man like you — with your intensity, your total lack of morals, of scruples, an almost inhuman human — inside me."
"There is but one way to find out."
"When do you plan to kill me, Señor Bluebeard? Before, during, or after?"
"I would never forego the joys of the flesh for money."
"And how… how am I to meet my Maker?"
"I haven't decided yet."
"Perhaps… during… I can convert you."
"Convert me?"
"Yes… with the added inducement of money, of course. Say, double what LeClerc offered you?"
"That would be a strong inducement. The master suite is on the right at the top of the stairs."
Armanda pirouetted and moved as if there were only air beneath her feet across the room and down the wide hall. Carter lit a cigarette and took several drags as he listened to her heels on the carpeted stairs.
When the sound faded, he moved into the great room, extinguishing lights as he went. In the darkness he mounted the stairs and then peered intently out the windows toward the winding road below.
Though the snow was coming down hard now, he could make out their car, a gray sedan. It was parked in a turnout on the first curve just below the villa.
Shielding the glow of his cigarette in his hand, he quickly let the pieces of the rest of the evening fall into place.
Armanda de Nerro was firmly convinced of his identity and the reason for his presence in Andorra.
As a hired killer, he had been bought. Therefore, he could be bought again. The price? Her body and enough dollars.
But, for Carter, that wouldn't be quite enough.
He would have to frighten her just a little bit more. He would have to make sure that his guess was right about the person who wanted her dead and wanted to take control of the ETA organization.
Then he would convince her that he, Nicholas Carstocus, could be of even further help to her. But only if he knew everything.
Once in the lady's confidence, Carter was fairly sure he could get the rest of it before she no longer needed him: mainly, the location of the missiles.
He walked down the stairs again and across the great room. The house was as still as a tomb as he mounted the main staircase and walked into the master suite.
She was the Naked Maja, sprawled beautifully across the bed. She had dimmed the lights until they seemed to make her body glow on the stark white linen sheets.
Carter could see every curve, every hollow, and every dimple in her supple body.
Before leaving, Estrellita had built a small fire. It burned low, providing little heat but a great deal of atmosphere.
Carter let his eyes drink in Armanda's nakedness as he slipped the dinner jacket and then the shirt from his body.
He continued to undress in unison with his movement toward her. His knees were against the foot of the bed when she spoke.
"Who is it, Nicholas?"
"Who?"
"The one who hired you?"
"LeClerc."
"No. LeClerc was only a messenger boy, a liaison. Was it Mendez, that old fool? Did he finally realize that violence is the only way?"
"Is that why you wanted Julio Mendez killed? Because you thought it was he who wanted you dead?"
"How did you know…?"
There wasn't much time now. He could see the wariness in her eyes, the look of an animal about to spring.
Words, phrases, accents from the previous evening flashed through Carter's brain.
…that betraying bitch…
Who had Armanda de Nerro betrayed?
"You do know, don't you," she said, her voice a whisper. "You do. I can see it in your eyes."
"I think I know… Manda."
Her hand came from beneath the pillow, holding a small automatic. Like a cat her body rolled from the bed. She was already swinging the gun around as her knees touched the carpet and her body tucked, making herself a spare target.
Carter had expected a reaction, but not one quite this bizarre.
Obviously the one thing she had wanted from Carter was the identity of her rival.
Now that she had it, Carter's usefulness was over.
The sound of the little gun firing was little more than a pop, but the flame shooting from the muzzle was bright in the dim room.
He could feel the slug pass by his ear as he threw himself onto the bed. She was rolling to her right on one knee as he bounced off the mattress above her.
The gun popped again, and Carter felt a tug on his left forearm as his right hand smashed her wrist. She groaned in pain but made a dive for the gun.
Carter managed to push it farther from her grasp with his knee and swung his right arm in a wide, powerful arc. The flat of his hand collided smartly with the side of her face.
She spun crazily across the carpet until her back hit the wall. Carter was on her in a second, but
there was still a lot of life left in her.
Both hands whipped toward his face like claws, her razor-like nails digging deep gouges in his cheeks.
Again his hand whipped around. This time the blow was solid. The sound of his knuckles against her chin was like a shot in the otherwise quiet room.
Armanda started to fold as he grabbed her throat with both hands and slammed her upright against the wall.
It was then that he saw the blood gushing from his left forearm and felt the pain.
Her second shot had found a home.
Even with the vise of his fingers at her throat, she kicked upward, trying to find his crotch with her knees.
"Be still!" he rasped, his face practically mashed against hers. "If you don't, I'll snap your neck like a twig!"
"Basta!" she managed to croak, even while relaxing in his grip.
"It's Lupe de Varga, isn't it?" No answer. "Did he call you Manda? Was that his little lover's name for you?"
"Yes."
"You set him up in Italy, didn't you. The whole business with the Red Brigade back then was a setup to get him out of the way, wasn't it?"
She didn't have to answer. He could see the truth of his words in her eyes.
"Didn't you know he was alive, that he had survived that fire in San Remo?"
"No."
"Why did he hire me to waste you, rather than just do it himself?"
She ignored his question and retaliated with one of her own.
"Who are you? How do you know so much…?"
"Do you want to live or die?" Carter growled, cutting her off. "I want something you've got. You can live until I get it."
Suddenly she brought her claws into play again, this time digging deeply into Carter's left arm right over the wound.
The pain was instantaneous and, for a brief second, almost blinding. Carter let out a guttural growl and instantly loosened his hold on her throat.
Armanda was across the room like a shot, falling to her knees, her hands finding and grasping the little automatic.
The slight dizziness still gripped Carter, but he managed to lurch toward her. His plan was to smash her to the floor with his superior weight, but again she was quicker than he thought.
She rolled sideways and, like a trained acrobat — or guerrilla fighter — came to her feet.
He crashed to the floor and rolled to his back.
There was little — probably no — chance now. She stood five feet from him, both hands holding the gun straight out from her heaving breasts. The tiny, dark hole of the automatic's muzzle was pointed straight at his belly.
Odd, Carter thought, how weirdly beautiful she is with blood dripping from her chin, her hair a tangled raven mass, defiance in her eyes, and sweat glistening on her naked, rippling body.
"Who are you?"
"Nicholas…"
"Who are you!" she shouted, her knuckles growing a little whiter on the trigger. "You know too much to be just a hired killer!"
And then he knew.
She was mad… mad as only a fanatic can be mad.
"I will not kill you quickly, you know. I will shoot you in the stomach first. It will burn like the fires of hell. And then I will fire into your kneecaps, first one, then the other…"
Carter tensed, anticipating the first shot when he said nothing. He would roll right. His left arm had already taken one slug; one more didn't matter that much now. Better in the arm than in the gut.
But he never had to move.
Suddenly the room exploded with sound and the deep valley between Armanda de Nerro's large, conical breasts was no more.
In its place was a huge round cavity exposing blood and bone.
The gun fell from her hands and her eyes rolled up in her head as she pitched forward across Carter's body.
Over her shoulder, in the doorway, he saw a figure in a dark trench coat. Just before his vision was canceled by de Nerro's body, the figure leaned forward and threw something into the room.
Carter got one brief glimpse of a horribly disfigured face with only one working eye. The other was only a white socket in raw flesh.
By the time he had disengaged himself from the bloody mess that had once been Armanda de Nerro, the figure was gone.
It did not take a medical degree to see that the woman was dead. The slug had entered her back squarely between the shoulder blades.
Its exit between her breasts Carter had already seen.
The rest of it was pretty plain as well.
Wilhelmina, gray wisps of smoke still oozing from her barrel, lay in the middle of the floor.
Lupe de Varga had gotten his revenge. Personally.
And at the same time he had framed an outsider, so the insiders within the ETA could never blame him for her death.
Maybe.
Carter grabbed Wilhelmina and bolted for the stairs. He ejected the magazine and found just what he had expected. It was empty.
In case of error, de Varga had not wanted another shell in the Luger to come looking for him.
Carter crossed the courtyard, knowing that there would be no retaliation on his part. He had barely reached the edge of the cliff when, far below him, he heard the sound of an engine. Seconds later he saw headlights through the snow and the trees. They swung in a U-turn and moved on down the mountain.
Back in the house, Carter started up the stairs only to come to a halt when his eye fell on a foot and part of a leg protruding from under the stairs.
It was Jock Loran, and he had a hole in his chest very similar to one Carter had just seen in the master bedroom.
Neat, he thought, very neat. Maybe it could even be construed as an accident of lustful fate: a love triangle.
Back upstairs, he moved through the bedroom into the bath.
He was a mess. Blood had already clotted in the grooves on his cheeks from Armanda's nails.
His arm was throbbing painfully, but the wound had closed over, and it, too, had clotted. The bullet had passed through clean but had left a spongy hole where it had exited.
Quickly, Carter repaired what he could of his face and upended a bottle of shaving lotion over his arm.
If his guess was right, he didn't have one hell of a lot of time.
It was.
He had barely bandaged the arm with torn strips of a pillowcase, when he heard cars gliding into the front courtyard.
Shrugging into a shirt and jacket, he darted momentarily into the hall. The great room below was flickering eerily with revolving blue lights through the window.
Pausing only long enough to grab four fresh magazines for Wilhelmina, Carter ran to the windows. As he stepped from the window to a tall Cyprus, he could hear the incessant banging on the front door.
He could almost hear Lupe de Varga's voice straining over a telephone wire to the local policia: "I was just driving past when I heard what I'm sure was gunfire. Can you imagine? In our quiet little country… gunfire? I know it is probably impossible, but I think you should investigate…"
Probably the only reason Carter had the time he did now to work his way down the tree to the ground was the improbability of it all.
Gunshots in Andorra? Crime — even murder — in this crime-free little paradise?
It was ten-to-one that they had discussed it at the police station for a good twenty minutes before deciding to investigate.
Nevertheless, it would be Carter's ass in the soup when they found two very dead expatriates, and one very missing.
Once on the ground, he worked his way along the ridge line to the comer of the house.
The side leading to the drive was clear, but the blue lights were still dancing at the front in the courtyard.
Going down to Andorra-la-Vella via the road was out of the question. Overland by foot, with the snow and the nearly straight-up-and-down precipice, was equally out.
There was only one way.
Carefully, Carter moved along the side of the house until he was directly across from the garage.
Taking a deep breath, he darted across the open space and ran into the gaping, open door of the garage. By feel he made his way to the rear and the ski locker he knew was there.
Five minutes later, shod in ski boots, his street shoes tied around his neck, he slipped through the rear door of the garage.
Two thousand feet directly below him lay the lights of Andorra-la-Vella.
As quietly as possible, he clamped boots to skis and poled to the very edge.
His vision was about forty yards, and his left arm hurt like hell.
At least one good thing, he thought. My tracks will be covered ten minutes after I make them.
Slowly he eased over the rim, and within seconds he was rocketing down the side of the mountain at better than sixty miles per hour.
Twelve
Nick Carter dumped the ski boots and skis in a large garbage bin and replaced the boots with his street shoes.
He emerged from a ravine behind a long row of hotels at the dark end of Les Escaldes. Gingerly, he walked parallel to the main street a hundred yards to his right.
Avenue el Pico was a tiny side street of shops and apartment houses. Louisa's hotel was on the comer of the main street and el Pico.
Carter stood, the snow turning his head and shoulders white, at the dead end of el Pico.
Between him and the hotel were four wide apartment buildings. There was no way he dared walk boldly through the hotel lobby by himself up to Louisa's room. There were only two ways: over the roofs or with Louisa's help.
He decided to try the latter first and crossed the street to a cellar beer garden. Just inside the door was a narrow hall with coats lining the walls on both sides.
Carter fingered through them until he found a high-collared topcoat approximately his size. He tugged it on and pushed through the door into the main room.
It was full, mostly youths around long, bare wooden tables. There was much laughter and clanking of heavy beer mugs as Carter pulled the fur collar up around his mutilated face and made his way through the tables toward a sign marked Teléfono.
It was perfect: a wall phone near a rear exit.
He dialed the hotel, and a sleepy-voiced concierge answered on the eighth ring.