by Ted Bell
Hawke snatched the list back from him, crumpled it, and jammed it down into the side pocket of his paint-spattered khaki trousers.
“Pelham, listen very clearly. I cannot, and will not, live in a house full of carpenters and painters and whatnot. I won’t do it! Enough to drive any man insane. I can’t do it!”
“Of course you can’t, m’lord,” Pelham said.
“Of course, you can’t, Alex, dear. No one would expect you to,” Diana chirped. “Would we, Pelham?”
“Certainly not, your ladyship.”
“I wonder . . .” Hawke said, eyeing his octogenarian valet through narrowed lids. “You didn’t by any chance summon Lady Mars to the premises this morning, did you, Pelham? Nothing in the way of a conspiracy here?”
“Certainly not, sir!”
“Oh, my, Alex, I just happened to be passing by en route to Trimingham’s,” Diana trilled. “To do a little shopping for Ambrose’s big birthday next week. Thought I’d bring you a cassoulet.”
“Hmm.”
“No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.”
Hawke looked from one to the other, dubious to say the least. Finally, beaten by this conspiracy of angels, he said, “And, for heaven’s sake, Diana, please don’t ask Pelham and me to come stay with you and Ambrose at Shadowlands. Oh, no. I hate being a guest. Not my cup of tea by a long shot. Sleeping upon some downy bed swathed in fancy French linen. Coming down to breakfast every day, trying to be polite in the bloody morning before I’ve even had a cup of my morning joe and, besides—”
Pelham, sensing her ladyship’s bristling offense at this tirade against guesting skills, coughed, again ever so discreetly, into his closed fist.
“With respect, sir, I would remind your lordship that the small sailing yacht you recently purchased in Jamaica, Santana, arrived early yesterday from her refit in the Turks and Caicos. She’s moored at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club docks as we speak.”
Diana brightened.
“Well, there you are, Alex! Perfect solution! Your new sailboat! There’s your answer, right there, isn’t it? After all, it’s only for a fortnight or so and then—there are far worse places on earth for two young bachelors than the bustling RBYC docks, if I’m not mistaken.”
Hawke considered this new notion for a long moment and grinned. His club was notorious for the numbers of beautiful women prowling the docks in search of suntanned old salts like himself, the young and the old, the strong and the infirm, the rich and the poor . . . Hawke had once said that the best thing about winning the annual Newport to Bermuda Race was that the prettiest girls had not yet been plucked away at the finish line.
He considered the notion of such a move to his club. As Pelham might say, such a move was “not without its particular merits and feasibilities.” That was certainly true in this case, wasn’t it? Diana, after all, for all her smothering motherly instincts, was in fact a good egg who had only his best interests at heart.
Why fight it?
Opportunity, as Shakespeare or someone of that ilk once said, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of life is bound in shallows and miseries.
Quite right, as usual, Shakespeare.
CHAPTER 17
And so it was that Alex Hawke and his octogenarian valet temporarily abandoned Teakettle Cottage and installed themselves aboard the gracious seventy-foot ketch Santana. After that first week of living aboard, he felt tanned and rested. He spent lazy days wearing nothing but his bathing trunks and catching fish off the stern. One evening, sipping a Dark ’n Stormy up on deck as the sun sank, Hawke had a revelation of sorts. He decided it would be hard to imagine a more pleasant place to spend one’s days and nights than on a beautiful boat moored at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club.
The salmon-colored clubhouse, surrounded by swaying royal palms, was situated on the famously beautiful Hamilton Harbour, right in the heart of the charming old town. And the club’s cedar-paneled bar was among the coziest spots on the planet, he thought, smiling at the barman as he strolled in for his evening restorative.
Horace Spain, known since memory as “Cap,” was a twelfth-generation Bermudian and had been behind that lovely old mahogany bar since Hawke could remember and—someone was smiling and waving madly at him from across the room—who she was, he hadn’t the foggiest.
“Hey! If it ain’t my old buddy himself, Lord Hawke,” said an amply curved blonde in a tight silk blouse. She was hailing him from a small corner table. “Come sit down and let me buy you a drink, honey. Dark ’n Stormy, if I remember right?”
“Crystal?”
“Hell, yes, son!”
Crystal Methune, from Louisville, Kentucky, Hawke’s memory registered. He’d met her two nights earlier at the club’s Annual Regatta Committee cocktail reception. An altogether alluring package, she was a newly minted divorcée. She had arrived in Bermuda on Sunday aboard Celestial. The spectacular 250-foot motor yacht had been awarded to her, she claimed, by a benevolent judge in her hell-to-pay-honey divorce in Palm Beach.
Hawke had liked her instantly. And it wasn’t the champagne courtesy of the Regatta Committee. There was something about her saucy sense of humor that reminded him slightly of his mother; she was also a southern belle, but born on the Louisiana banks of the muddy Mississippi rather than Crystal’s red clay topsoil of Kentucky horse country. She’d let it drop that she was the owner of the Horse of the Year, a spectacular racehorse named Buckpasser.
The Englishman had always found women from the American southland to be both funny, wise, and, beneath a brave facade . . . somewhat sad and vulnerable, a combination that equaled charm . . . in his mind anyway.
Hawke looked at the woman and her attendant cleavage and then smiled at Cap, the old black barman, shrugging his shoulders in the what the hell are you going to do? manner that all men instinctively understood, and pulled out a chair.
“Crystal,” he said, “I thought you were sailing on the morning tide for Nantucket.”
“Decided to stick around, darlin’. Fishing’s pretty good here right about now. Especially around the docks. Know what I mean?”
“Ah, I fish, too,” Hawke said, brightening.
“Not the way I do, honey.”
“Sorry?”
“I mean I never stop. Until I got ’em hooked, gaffed, and thrashing around in the bottom of the boat. Trick is not to marry ’em.”
Hawke, amused by the image of a woman marrying a cold fish, laughed, took a sip of his drink, and turned the high beams on her. A little female companionship might do him good. It had been a long, long time. Besides, why the hell not?
“You have plans for dinner tonight, Crystal?”
“Listen, honey, I hope to hell I do.”
“I make a mean spaghetti bolognese. It’s simmering away down in the galley aboard my little boat as we speak. Hope you like garlic.”
She looked him up, down, and back again. Then she reared up at the table and mimed hauling back and reeling on a deep sea fishing rod. She said: “And so the gleaming sunlit trophy fish, twisting and writhing on my silvery hook, rises majestically to the bait . . .”
“And yet you seem like such a nice girl, Crystal.” Hawke smiled.
“Pure as the driven slush, honey,” she replied.
Hawke laughed, a portion of his beloved Dark ’n Stormy going down the wrong way.
ABOARD CELESTIAL, THE CREW WAS going about its duties. Colonel Beau Beauregard, the soldier of fortune who was the 250-foot yacht’s owner, was in his quarters. He had asked not to be disturbed. He’d informed the steward in the galley that he’d be dining alone tonight in the owner’s stateroom.
He was stretched out on the oversized round bed, naked beneath his black silk-paisley dressing gown from Charvet. He was a big man, heavily muscled but sleek and quick, with a steely intelligence belied by his overpowering aspect and athletic appearance.
His eyes were so dark that many people thought they were black. Black with startling glints
of red when he was angry, they said, fierce fits of rage that occurred with ever increasing frequency since his public humiliation and fall from grace. The colonel tried to mask his anger with the courtly manners of a southern gent, but it was far too intense for him to cover up. He literally seethed anger.
And woe unto those who crossed him. Here was a man who had won worldwide fame and amassed a vast fortune by killing for money. Look in the dictionary under “mercenary”? You see his picture. Now only one thing motivated Colonel Beauregard and it wasn’t money: it was a bottomless pit boiling in his soul, filled to overflowing fiery hatred and the overwhelming need to exact revenge.
The stateroom was nearly black, only a few hidden lights in the overhead giving a soft pearly glow.
He was staring at a dark blue ceiling pinpointed with lights depicting in real time the shifting positions of constellations, a pair of high-tech headphones covering his ears. He pressed a hidden button and a wall-sized mirror behind his bed slid silently back into the bulkhead.
Revealed were the winking red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. It was a mainframe IBM computer linked to a massive telecommunications system with global satellite capabilities similar to the one that afforded U.S. presidents worldwide links aboard Air Force One.
He knew what was back there. His company, Vulcan, which, before his epic fall from grace, had been the worldwide leader in mercenary troops and weaponry for hire, had helped design both systems for the United States Air Force.
His headphones crackled and his ears perked up. He was now privy to anything being said or done aboard Lord Hawke’s yacht, Santana. What he hoped, what he really wanted, was for his favorite gun-for-hire, Crystal Meth, he called her, to fuck the guy before she delivered the lethals. Yeah, that would be good. Like that drunken CIA dickhead she did in Paris at the Bristol in the spring. And it was icing on the cake she’d been able to team up with Spider Payne, who had his own agenda in that escapade. What a hoot.
His headphones went live again, so clear and static free: “Miss Crystal Methune is arrived back on deck, m’lord,” he heard an elderly Englishman, obviously a butler, say. “I offered her champagne but she asked for our best bourbon, sir.”
“Ah, good. What do we have on board?” he heard Lord Hawke reply.
“I suggest the Knob Creek, sir. She says she is formerly from Kentucky. Louisville, I believe.”
“Make it so, dear soul. And inform our lovely guest that I shall be with her momentarily.”
“Indeed, sir.”
BEAUREGARD CLASPED HIS HANDS BEHIND his head, leaned back against the pillows, and smiled as his favorite constellation, Orion, arced overhead across the twinkling ceiling. His “Furies” as he called Crystal Meth and his stable of female assassins, were the best in the world. Relentlessly seductive, they found ever more inventive ways to kill without a trace; ways that could never, ever, be traced back to him.
“This is going to be good,” Beauregard whispered to himself, a wide grin spreading across his bronzed face. Besides money and women, nothing held more appeal for the Texan than ice cold revenge.
“I’ve got you, you rich, MI6 fuck,” the colonel said aloud, savoring the sounds of his words.
And he was just getting warmed up. Sooner or later, the whole damn world would feel his wrath, his terrible vengeance. Like his old daddy once said during the Texas High School Football Championship when he knocked a big tackle from Lubbock unconscious, “People got to learn sooner or later, Beau, you fuck with a truck, you get run over. You’re a truck, boy, and don’t you ever forget it.”
CHAPTER 18
After dinner, Hawke stretched back against the faded red cockpit cushions. He lit a Cohiba Torpedo with his old steel Zippo, puffing to get it fully lit. There was a slight chill in the air, that cold front moving in from the west. Unfortunately for his dinner plans, it had begun to rain during the first course, misty and light, but steady, and he was grateful to Pelham for rigging the overhead canopy from the boom. The sound of soft rain drumming on taut canvas above had always soothed him.
And, since this was Bermuda, the shower stopped suddenly and the late sun was shining once more. He watched Crystal pat her lips with her napkin, ever so demurely.
“Damn that spaghetti was good, darlin’,” Crystal said, sipping her bourbon neat. “You were right, Lordy, that wasn’t a mean bolognese, that was serial killer bolognese.”
During dinner her short skirt had ridden up on her tanned brown thighs, revealing a glimpse of bright lacy pink at the nexus of her long bare legs. She caught him looking and smiled. Then, turning her head this way and that to catch the late rays of the sun, she asked, “This side? Or this one? What do you think, Lordy? Which side do you think is my best side?”
“I think you’re sitting on it.”
Crystal exploded with laughter, spewing bourbon everywhere, including Lord Hawke’s pristine white linen blazer.
“You certainly give as good as you get, don’t you, buddy boy?” she said.
“Mmmm,” Hawke murmured, looking quickly away, his thoughts already elsewhere. He couldn’t help wondering if this woman aimed to get him deep in the feathers tonight. Or, if she did, if he even should. His heart was in another place, after all.
The woman looked at her diamond wristwatch and said, “Oh Lordy! It’s way past my bedtime!”
His lonely heart was back in England. It was with Nell, the woman who cared for and protected his son, Alexei. It was with her that his heart had once more found some small measure of peace and solace.
“Hello? Are you in there, Lord? I asked you a question,” Crystal said.
“Sorry. I was listening to the distant cry of the seabirds. And please don’t call me ‘Lord’ or ‘Lordy,’ Crystal. My name is Alex, as I told you when we met. You sound like the Apostle John, addressing Jesus, if you must know.”
Crystal leaned forward to give him the benefit of her very unapostolic cleavage and smiled.
“The birds. Isn’t that sweet? You’re listening to the birds.”
“Yes. Lovely, isn’t it? Those are petrels, you know.”
“Petrels.”
“The Storm Petrel, to be exact. So named by ornithologists because it is always the first bird to appear as a harbinger of bad weather. The sight of petrels heralds an approaching storm, you see, to seaman everywhere.”
A brief silence fell. In that moment, she placed her hand on his thigh, stroking him with a repetitive motion that was not unwelcome. Like it or no, it had been a very long time indeed.
“So, Mr. Hawke, Alex, do I get a personal tour of this floating gin palace or not? I got more curiosity in me than a roomful of female cats in heat.”
“Ah. Lovely image. Would you like to go up forward? Brilliant view of the harbor at twilight from up there on the bow deck.”
“No. Not up forward. I’d like to go down below-ward.”
“Not much to see down below, I’m afraid. Standard-issue yacht configuration. Galley and saloon amidships, two staterooms forward, owner’s stateroom aft.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Hmm. It’s got beds somewhere, I’ll bet.”
Hawke laughed. “Well, I suppose there are a few of those down there, yes.”
“Well, hell, Lordy, let’s go get a look at them. Test out them springs.”
“Well, interesting notion, Crystal. But there is Pelham, you see, and—”
“Pelham. That old coot. Can’t you give him the rest of the night off?”
“Ah. Coot, did you say? Not really. You see, my dear woman, Pelham, that old coot, as you call him, happens to be a lifelong friend of mine, actually, and—”
Her eyes were gleaming in the candlelit gloom, soft one moment, and then hard; Crystal had turned what is sometimes referred to as a gimlet eye upon him. Not a woman who cherished criticism, apparently.
Hawke returned the stone-cold glance in kind. The woman had crossed a line. People insul
ted Pelham at their peril on this boat.
And, at that awkward moment, as if on cue, Pelham crystallized on deck.
“Dreadfully sorry to disturb, m’lord, but there’s a call on the encrypted ship-to-shore, sir. Caller wouldn’t give his name, I’m afraid.”
“He didn’t have to. I know who it is. Thank you, Pelham. I’m sorry, Crystal. I need to take this call. Business, you see. I shan’t be long I don’t think. Please ask Pelham for anything you need.”
She still looked awfully put out, to put it mildly.
“Swell,” she said, unable to keep the sarcastic peevishness out of her voice.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Hawke murmured under his breath, disappearing below. Women, he thought. Hell hath no fury and all that. No place for them on a small boat. You needed space, to parry and thrust . . . and, sometimes, to escape.
HAWKE DESCENDED THE WIDE MAHOGANY steps and settled into the small leather chair at the nav station. It was just forward of the galley. He took a deep breath and removed the transceiver from its cradle on the radio.
“Brick,” Hawke said to the CIA director. “What’s up?”
“Bad news, m’lord,” the Virginian said, in his soft southern drawl.
“Blurt it out.”
“I will, I will, as soon as you’re sitting down, old man.”
“Sounds bad. Tell me.”
“Your late, unlamented colleague, Artemis Payne.”
“Spider? He’s dead. What about him?”
“Artemis, apparently, was not, as we both imagined, the end of the current nightmare, Alex.”
“No?”
“No. He was maybe just the beginning. Maybe Spider was working for someone besides himself. Someone who had lots of other little spiders running around.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Deadly serious, I’m afraid. You’ve heard of a Kremlin biggie named General Nastase Borkov? ‘Nasty,’ as he’s known far and wide.”