Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘I understand, Nicholas, truly I do. However, when you are ready, as you will be soon, then Peter and I and Christy Marine are waiting for you still. This is your world, Nicholas.’ She made a gesture which embraced it all. ‘This is your world, you will never really leave it.’

  ‘You are wrong, Chantelle.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I am very seldom wrong, and on this I cannot be wrong. Last night proved that, it is still there - every bit of it. But let's discuss the other thing now, Golden Dawn and Christy Marine.

  Chantelle Alexander lifted her face to the sky and watched the big silver bird fly. It climbed nose high, glinting in the sunlight, twin trails of dark unconsumed fuel spinning out behind it as the engines howled under the full thrust. With the wind in this quarter, the extended centreline of the main Nice runway brought it out over Cap Ferrat.

  Beside Chantelle, only an inch or two shorter than she was, Peter stood and watched it also and she took his arm, tucking her small dainty hand into the crook of his elbow.

  ‘He stayed such a short time,’ Peter said, and overhead the big airbus turned steeply on to its crosswind leg.

  ‘We will have him with us again soon,’ Chantelle promised, and then she went on. ‘Where were you, Peter? We hunted all over when it was time for Daddy to go?’

  ‘I was in the forest,’ he said evasively. He had heard them calling, but Peter was hidden in the secret place, the smuggler's cleft in the yellow rock of the cliff; he would have killed himself rather than let Nicholas Berg see him weeping.

  ‘Wouldn't it be lovely if it was like the old times again?’ Chantelle asked softly, and the boy stirred beside her, but unable to take his gaze from the aircraft, ‘Just the three of us again?’

  ‘Without Uncle Duncan?’ he asked incredulously, and high above them the aircraft, with a last twinkle of sunlight, dove deeply into the banks of cumulus cloud that buttressed the northern sky. Peter turned at last to face her.

  ‘Without Uncle Duncan?’ he demanded again. ‘But that's impossible.’

  ‘Not if you help me, darling.’ She took his face in her cupped hands. ‘You will help me, won't you?’ she asked, and he nodded once, a sharply incisive gesture of assent; she leaned forward and kissed him tenderly on the forehead.

  ‘That's my man,’ she whispered.

  ‘Mr. Alexander is not available. May I take a message?’

  ‘This is Mrs. Alexander. Tell my husband that it's urgent.’

  ‘Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Alexander.,’ The secretary's voice changed instantly, cool caution becoming effusive servility. ‘I didn't recognize your voice. The line is dreadful, Mr. Alexander will speak to you directly.’

  Chantelle waited, staring impatiently from the study windows. The weather had changed in the middle of the morning with the cold front sweeping down off the mountains, and now icy wind and rain battered at the windows.

  ‘Chantelle, my dear,’ the rich glossy voice that had once so dazzled her, ‘is this my call to you?’

  ‘It's mine, Duncan. I must speak to you urgently.’

  ‘Good, he agreed with her. I wanted to speak to you also. Things are happening swiftly here. It's necessary for you to come up to St Nazaire next Tuesday, instead of my joining you at Cap Ferrat.’

  ‘Duncan-‘

  But he went on over her protest, his voice as full of self-confidence, as ebullient as she had not heard it in over a year.

  ‘I have been able to save almost four weeks on Golden Dawn.’

  ‘Duncan, listen to me.’

  ‘We will be able to launch on Tuesday. it will be a makeshift ceremony, I'm afraid, at such short notice.’ He was inordinately proud of his own achievement. It annoyed her to hear him. ‘What I have arranged is that the pod tanks will be delivered direct to the Gulf from the Japanese yards. They are towing them in their ballast with four American tugs. I will launch the hull here, with workmen still aboard her, and they will finish her off at sea during the passage around Good Hope, in time for her to take on her tanks and cargo at El Barras. We'll save nearly seven and a half million-‘

  ‘Duncan! Chantelle cried again, and this time something in her tone stopped him.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘This can't wait until Tuesday, I want to see you right away.’

  ‘That's impossible,’ he laughed, lightly, confidently.

  ‘It's only five days. Five days is too long. Tell me now,’ he invited. ‘What is it?’

  ‘All right,’ she said deliberately, and the vicious streak of Persian cruelty was in her voice. ‘I want a divorce, Duncan, and I want control of my shares in Christy Marine again.’

  There was a long, hissing crackling silence on the line, and she waited, the way the cat waits for the first movement of the crippled mouse.

  ‘This is very sudden.’ His voice had changed completely, it was bleak and flat, lacking any timbre or resonance.

  ‘We both know it is not,’ she contradicted him.

  ‘You have no grounds.’ There was a thin edge of fear now. Divorce isn't quite as easy as that, Chantelle.’

  ‘How is this for grounds, Duncan?’ she asked, and there was a spiteful sting in her voice now. ‘If you aren't here by noon tomorrow, then my auditors will be in Leadenhall Street and there will be an urgent order before the courts-’

  She did not have to go on, he spoke across her and there was a note of panic in his voice. She had never heard it before. He said, ‘You are right. We do have to talk right away.’ Then he was silent again, collecting himself, and his voice was once more calm and careful when he went on, ‘I can charter a Falcon and be at Nice before midday. Will that do?’

  ‘I'll have the car meet you,’ she said, and broke the connection with one finger. She held the bar down for a second, then lifted her finger.

  ‘I want to place an international call,’ she said in her fluent rippling French when the operator answered. ‘I do not know the number, but it is person to person. Doctor Samantha Silver at the University of Miami.’

  ‘There is a delay of more than two hours, madame.’

  ‘J’attendrai,’ she said, and replaced the receiver.

  The Bank of the East is in Curzon Street, almost opposite the White Elephant Club. It has a narrow frontage of bronze and marble and glass, and Nicholas had been there, with his lawyers, since ten o'clock that morning. He was learning at first hand the leisurely age-old ritual of oriental bargaining.

  He was selling Ocean Salvage, plus two years of his future labour - and even for seven million dollars he was beginning to wonder if it was worth it - and it was not a certain seven million either. The words tripped lightly, the figures seemed to have no substance in this setting. The only constant was the figure of the Prince himself, seated on the low couch, in a Saville Row suit but with the fine white cotton and gold-corded headdress framing his dark handsome features with theatrical dash.

  Beyond him moved a shadowy, ever-changing background of unctuous whispering figures. Every time Nicholas believed that a point had been definitely agreed, another rose-pink or acid-yellow Rolls-Royce with Arabic script number-plates would deposit three or four more dark-featured Arabs at the front doors and they would hurry through to kiss the Prince on his forehead, on the bridge of his nose and on the back of his hand, and the hushed discussion would begin all over again with the newcomers picking up at the point they had been an hour previously.

  James Teacher showed no impatience, and he smiled and nodded and went through the ritual like an Arab born, sipping the little thimbles of treacly coffee and watching patiently for the interminable whisperings to be translated into English before making a measured counter proposal.

  ‘We are doing fine, Mr. Berg,’ he assured Nicholas quietly. ‘A few more days.’

  Nicholas had a headache from the strong coffee and he found it difficult to concentrate. He kept worrying about Samantha, For four days he had tried to contact her. He had to get out for a while and he excused himself to the
Prince, and went down to the Enquiries Desk in the Bank's entrance hall and the girl told him,

  ‘I'm sorry, sir, there is no reply to either of those numbers.

  ‘There must be,’ Nicholas told her. One number was Samantha's shack at Key Biscayne and the other was her private number in her laboratory.

  She shook her head. ‘I've tried every hour.’

  ‘Can you send a cable for me?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  She gave him a pad of forms and he wrote out the message. ‘Please phone me urgently, reverse charges to-’ He gave the Queens Gate flat and James Teacher's rooms, then thought with the pen poised, trying to find the words to express his concern, but there were none. ‘I love you,’ he wrote. ‘I really do.’

  Since Nicholas's midnight call to tell her of the carriage of cad-rich crude petroleum, Samantha Silver had been caught up in a kaleidoscope whirl of time and events.

  After a series of meetings with the leaders of the Green-Peacers, and other conservation bodies in an effort to publicize and oppose this new threat to the oceans, she and Tom Parker had flown to Washington and met with a deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency and with two young senators who spearheaded the conservation lobby but their efforts to go further had been frustrated by the granite walls of big oil interest. Even usually cooperative sources had been wary of condemning or speaking out against Orient Amex's new carbon-cracking technology. As one thirty-year-old Democrat senator had pointed out, ‘It's tough to try and take a shot at something that's going to increase the fossil fuel yield by fifty percent.’

  ‘That's not what we are shooting at,’ Samantha had flared, bitter with fatigue and frustration. ‘It's this irresponsible method of carrying the cad-rich through sensitive and highly vulnerable seaways we are trying to prevent.’ But when she presented the scenario she had worked out, picturing the effects on the North Atlantic deluged with a million tons of toxic crude, she saw the disbelief in the man's eyes and the condescending smile of the sane for the slightly demented.

  ‘Oh God, why is common sense the hardest thing in the world to sell?’ she had lamented.

  She and Tom had gone on to meet the leaders of Green-Peace in the north, and in the west, and they had given advice and promises of support. The Californian Chapter counselled physical intervention as a last resort, as some of their members had successfully interposed small craft between the Russian whalers and the breeding Minkes they were hunting in the Californian Gulf In Galveston, they met the young Texans who would picket the Orient Amex refinery as soon as they were certain the ultra-tanker had entered the Gulf of Mexico.

  However, none of their efforts were successful in provoking confrontation with Orient Amex. The big oil company simply ignored invitations to debate the charges on radio or television, and stone-walled questions from the media.

  It's hard to stir up interest in a one-sided argument, Samantha found.

  They managed one local Texas television show, but without controversy to give it zip, the producer cut Samantha's time down to forty-five seconds, and then tried to date her for dinner.

  The energy crisis, oil tankers and oil pollution were joyless subjects. Nobody had ever heard of cadmium pollution, the Cape of Good Hope was half a world away, million tons was a meaningless figure, impossible to visualize, and it was all rather a bore.

  The media let it drop flat on its face.

  ‘We're just going to have to smoke those fat cats at Orient Amex out into the open,’ Tom Parker growled angrily, ‘and kick their arses blue for them. The only way we are going to do that is through Green-Peace.’

  They had landed back at Miami International, exhausted and disappointed, but not yet despondent. ‘Like the man said,’ Samantha muttered grimly, as she threaded her gaudy van back into the city traffic flow, ‘we have only just begun to fight.’

  She had only a few hours to clean herself up and stretch out on the patchwork quilt before she had to dress again and race back to the airport. The Australian had already passed through customs and was looking lost and dejected in the terminal lobby.

  ‘Hi, I'm Sam Silver.’ She pushed away fatigue, and hoisted that brilliant golden smile like a flag.

  His name was Mr. Dennis O'Connor and he was top man in his field, doing fascinating and important work on the reef populations of Eastern Australian waters, and he had come a long way to talk to her and see her experiments.

  ‘I didn't expect you to be so young.’ She had signed her correspondence Doctor Silver and he gave the standard reaction to her. Samantha was just tired and angry enough not to take it.

  ‘And I'm a woman. You didn't expect that either,’ she agreed. ‘It's a crying bastard, isn't it? But then, I bet some of your best friends are young females.’ He was a dinky-die Aussie, and he loved it.

  He burst into an appreciative grin, and as they shook hands, he said, ‘You are not going to believe this, but I like you just the way you are.’

  He was tall and lean, sunburned and just a little grizzled at the temples, and within minutes they were friends, and the respect with which he viewed her work confirmed that.

  The Australian had brought with him, in an oxygenated container, five thousand live specimens of E. Digitalis, the common Australian water snail, for inclusion in Samantha's experimentation. He had selected these animals for their abundance and their importance in the ecology of the Australian inshore waters, and the two of them were soon so absorbed in the application of Samantha's techniques to this new creature that when her assistant stuck her head through and yelled, ‘Hey, Sam, there's a call for you,’ she shouted back, ‘Take a message. If they're lucky I'll call them back.’

  ‘It's international, person to person!’ and Samantha's pulse raced; instantly forgotten was the host of Spiral-coned sea snails.

  ‘Nicholas!’ she shouted happily, spilled half a pint of sea water down the Australian's trouser leg and ran wildly to the small cubicle at the end of the laboratory.

  She was breathless with excitement as she snatched up the receiver and she pressed one hand against her heart to stop it thumping.

  ‘Is that Doctor Silver?’

  ‘Yes! It's me.’ Then correcting her grammar, ‘It is she!’

  ‘Go ahead, please,’ said the operator, and there was a click and pulse on the line as it came alive.

  ‘Nicholas!’ she exulted. ‘Darling Nicholas, is that you?’

  ‘No.’ The voice was very clear and serene, as though the speaker stood beside her, and it was familiar, disconcertingly so, and for no good reason Samantha felt her heart shrink with dread.

  ‘This is Chantelle Alexander, Peter's mother. We have met briefly.’

  ‘Yes.’ Samantha's voice was now small, and still breathless.

  ‘I thought it would be kind to tell you in person, before you hear from other sources - that Nicholas and I have decided to re-marry.’

  Samantha sat down jerkily on the office stool.

  ‘Are you there?’ Chantelle asked after a moment.

  ‘I don't believe you,’ whispered Samantha.

  ‘I'm sorry,’ Chantelle told her gently. ‘But there is Peter, you see, and we have rediscovered each other - discovered that we had never stopped loving each other.’

  ‘Nicholas wouldn't –‘ her voice broke, and she could not go on.

  ‘You must understand and forgive him, my dear,’ Chantelle explained. ‘After our divorce he was hurt and lonely. I'm sure he did not mean to take advantage of you.’

  ‘But, but - we were supposed to, we were going to-‘

  ‘I know. Please believe me, this has not been easy for any of us. For all our sakes-‘

  ‘We had planned a whole life together.’ Samantha shook her head wildly, and a thick skein of golden hair came loose and flopped into her face, she pushed it back with a combing gesture.’I don't believe it, why didn't Nicholas tell me himself? I won't believe it until he tells me.’

  Chantelle's voice was compassionate, gen
tle. ‘I so wanted not to make it ugly for you, my child, but now what can I do but tell you that Nicholas spent last night in my house, in my bed, in my arms, where he truly belongs.’

  It was almost miraculous, a physical thing, but sitting hunched on the hard round stool Samantha Silver felt her youth fall away from her, sloughed off like a glittering reptilian skin. She was left with the sensation of timelessness, possessed of all the suffering and sorrow of every woman who had lived before. She felt very old and wise and sad, and she lifted her fingers and touched her own not dried cheek, mildly surprised to feel that the skin was and withered like that of some ancient crone.

  ‘I have already made the arrangements for a divorce from my present husband, and Nicholas will resume his position at the head of Christy Marine.’

  It was true, Samantha knew then that it was true. There was no question, no doubt, and slowly she replaced the receiver of the telephone, and sat staring blankly at the bare wall of the cubicle. She did not cry, she felt as though she would never cry, nor laugh, again in her life.

  Chantelle Alexander studied her husband carefully, trying to stand outside herself, and to see him dispassionately. She found it easier now that the giddy insanity had burned away.

  He was a handsome man, tall and lean, with those carefully groomed metallic waves of coppery hair. Even the wrist that he shot from the crisp white cuff of his sleeve was covered with those fine gleaming hairs. She knew so well that even his lean chest was covered with thick golden curls, crisp and curly as fresh lettuce leaves. She had never been attracted by smooth hairless men.

  ‘May I smoke?’ he asked, and she inclined her head. His voice had also attracted her from the first, deep and resonant, but with those high-bred accents, the gentle softening of the vowel sounds, the lazy drawling of consonants. The voice and the patrician manner were things that she had been trained to appreciate - and yet, under the mannered cultivated exterior was the flash of exciting wickedness, that showed in the wolfish white gleam of smile, and the sharp glittering grey steel of his gaze.

  He lit the custom-made cigarette with the gold lighter she had given him - her very first gift, the night they had become lovers, Even now, the memory of it was piquant, and for a moment she felt the soft melting warmth in her lower belly and she stirred restlessly in her chair. There had been reason, and good reason for that madness, and even now it was over, she would never regret it.