Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, counting slowly to one hundred, emptying his mind completely, and then giving himself the command: "Think!" All right, Caliph knew his movements intimately. Even to when he was expected at the Dorchester. that? Cynthia, Colin Noble, Magda Altmann and the secretary at Rambouillet who had made the reservation, Colin's secretary at Thor, the Dorchester staff, and anybody else who had made even an idle study of Peter's movements would know he always stayed at the Dorchester. That was a cul-de-sac.

  "Think!" Today was April fourth. There were sixteen days before Caliph sent him Melissa-Jane's severed hand. He felt the panic mounting again, and he forced it back.

  "Think!" Caliph had been watching him, studying him in detail, assessing his value. Peter's value was that he could move unsuspected in high places. He could reach the head of Atlas by simply requesting an audience. More than that, he could probably get access to any head of state if he wanted it badly enough.

  For the first time in his life Peter felt the need for liquor.

  He crossed quickly to the cabinet and fumbled with the key. A stranger's face stared at him out of the gilt-framed mirror above it.

  The face was pale, haggard, with deep parentheses framing the mouth.

  There were plum-coloured bruises of fatigue below the eyes, and the gaunt, bony jaw was gun-metal blue with a new beard and the sapphire blue of the eyes had a wild deranged glitter. He looked away from his own image. It only increased his sense of unreality.

  He poured half a tumbler of Scotch whisky, and drank half of it straight off. He coughed at the sting of the liquor and a drop of it broke from the corner of his mouth and trickled down his chin. He wiped it away with his thumb, and turned back to study the sheet of white paper again. It was crumpled already, where he had gripped it too hard. He smoothed it carefully.

  "Think!" he told himself. This was how Caliph worked, then.

  Never exposing himself. Picking his agents with incredible attention to detail. Fanatics, like the girl, Ingrid who had led the taking of Flight 070. Trained assassins, like the man he had killed in the river at La Pierre Brute.

  Experts in high places, like General Peter Stride. Studying them, assessing them and their capabilities, and finally finding their price.

  Peter had never believed the old law that every man had his price.

  He had believed himself above that general rule.

  Now he knew he was not and the knowledge sickened him.

  Caliph had found his price, found it unerringly. Melissa-Jane.

  Suddenly Peter had a vivid memory of his daughter on horseback, swivelling in the saddle to laugh and call back to him.

  "Super-Star!" And the sound of her laughter on the wind.

  Peter shivered, and without realizing it he crumpled the sheet of paper to a ball in his fist.

  Ahead of him he saw the road that he was destined to follow. With a new flash of insight, he realized that he had already taken his first steps along the road. He had done so when he had put the gun to Ingrid in the terminal. of Johannesburg Airport, when he had made himself judge and executioner.

  Caliph had been responsible for that first step on the road to corruption, and now it was Caliph who was driving him farther along it.

  With a sudden prophetic glimpse ahead, Peter knew it would not end with the life of Kingston Parker. Once he was committed to Caliph, it would be for ever or until one of them, Peter Stride, or Caliph, was completely destroyed.

  Peter drank the rest of the whisky in the tumbler.

  Yes, Melissa-Jane was his price. Caliph had made the correct bid.

  Nothing else would have driven him to it.

  Peter picked the booklet of matches off the liquor cabinet and like a sleepwalker moved through to the bathroom. He twisted the sheet of paper into a taper and lit the end of it, holding it over the toilet bowl. He held it until the flame scorched his fingers painfully, then dropped it into the bowl and flushed the ash away.

  He went back into the lounge, and refilled the glass with whisky.

  He picked the comfortable armchair below the window and sank into it.

  Only then did he realize how very weary he was. The nerves in his thighs quivered and twitched uncontrollably.

  He thought about Kingston Parker. A man like that had an incalculable amount to offer mankind. It will have to look like an assassination attempt aimed at me, Peter thought. One that finds the wrong victim.

  "A bomb," Peter thought. He hated the bomb. Somehow it seemed to be the symbol of the senseless violence which he hated. He had seen it used in Ireland and in London town, and he hated it. The undirected destruction, mindless, merciless.

  "It will have to be a bomb," he decided, and with surprise he found that his hatred had found a new target. Again for the first time ever, he hated himself for what he was going to do.

  Caliph had won. He knew that against an adversary of that calibre there was no chance they would find where Melissa-Jane was hidden.

  Caliph had won, and Peter Stride sat the rest of the night planning an act which he had dedicated his life, until then, to prevent.

  cannot understand why we haven't had the demand A contact yet."

  Inspector Richards ran his hand distractedly across his pate, disturbing the feathery wisps that covered it and leaving them standing out at a startled angle.

  "It's five days now. Still no demands."

  "They know where to contact Peter," Colin Noble agreed.

  "The interview he gave covered that." Peter Stride had appeared on BBC TV to broadcast an appeal to the kidnappers not to maim his daughter further, and to the general public to offer any information that might lead to her rescue.

  On the same programme they had displayed the police identikit portrait of the driver of the maroon Triumph prepared by the one witness.

  The response had been overwhelming, jamming the switchboard at Inspector Richards's special headquarters, and a mixed bag had fallen into the net.

  A fourteen-year-old runaway had the police barge into the Bournemouth apartment where she was in bed with her thirty-two-year-old lover. She was returned weeping bitterly to the bosom of her family, and had again disappeared within twenty-four hours.

  In North Scotland the police sadly bungled a raid on a remote cottage hired by a man with the same lank dark hair and gunfighter's mustache as the identikit portrait. He turned out to be a cottage-industry manufacturer of LSD tablets, and he and his four assistants, one of them a young girl who vaguely fitted the description of Melissa-Jane in that she was female and blonde, had scattered across the Highlands before being overtaken and borne to earth by sweating pounding members of the Scottish Constabulary.

  Peter Stride was furious. "If it had been Melissa-Jane, they would have had fifteen minutes in which to put her down-" He raged at Richards. "You've got to let Thor go in to the next raid." Through the Thor communications net he spoke directly to Kingston Parker on the video screens.

  We'll put all our influence into it," Parker agreed, and then with deep compassion in his eyes, "Peter, I'm living every minute of this with you. I cannot escape the knowledge that I have placed you into this terrible situation. I did not expect the attack would come through your daughter. I think you know that you can call on me for any support you need."

  "Thank you, sir," said Peter and for a moment felt his resolve weaken. In ten days he would have to execute this man. He steeled himself by thinking of a puckered dead white finger floating in its tiny bottle.

  Kingston Parker's influence worked immediately. Six hours later the order came down from Downing Street via the Commissioner of Police, that the next raid on a suspect hideout would be conducted by Thor Command.

  The Royal Air Force placed two helicopters at Thor's disposal for the duration of the operation, and Thor's assault unit went into intensive training for penetration and removal under urban conditions.

  Peter trained with them, he and Colin swiftly re-establishing the old rapport of co
ncerted action.

  When they were not practising and refining the exit and assembly from the hovering helicopters, Peter spent much of his time in the enclosed pistol range, trying to drown his awareness in the crash of gunfire, but the days passed swiftly in a series of false alarms and misleading clues.

  Each night when Peter examined his face in the mirror above the liquor cabinet, it was more haggard, the blue eyes muddied by fatigue and terrible gut eroding terror of what the next day might bring forth.

  There were six days left when Peter left the hotel room before breakfast, caught the tube at Green Park and left it again at Finsbury

  Park. In a garden supplies shop near the station he purchased a twenty-pound plastic bag of ammonium nitrate garden fertilizer. He carried it back to the Dorchester in a locked Samsonite suitcase and stored it in the closet behind his hanging trenchcoat.

  That night, when he spoke to Magda Altmann, she pleaded once again to be allowed to come to London.

  "Peter I know I can be of help to you. Even if it's just to stand beside you and hold your hand."

  "No. We've been over that." He could hear the brutal tone in his own voice, but could not control it. He knew that he was getting very close to the edge. "Have you heard anything?"

  "I'm sorry, Peter. Nothing, absolutely nothing. My sources are doing all that is possible." Peter bought the dieseline from a pump at the Lex Garage in Brewer Street. He took five lit res in a plastic screw-topped container that had contained a household detergent. The pump attendant was a pimply teenager in dirty overalls. He was completely uninterested in the transaction.

  In his bathroom Peter worked on the dieseline and the nitrate from the garden shop. He produced twenty-one pounds of savagely weight-efficient high explosive that was, none the less, docile until activated by a blasting cap such as he had devised with a flashlight bulb.

  It would completely devastate the entire suite, utterly destroying everybody and everything in it. However, the damage should be confined to those three rooms.

  It would be a simple matter to lure Kingston Parker to the suite under the pretence of having urgent information about Caliph to deliver, information so critical that it could only be delivered in person and in private.

  That night the face in the mirror above the liquor cabinet was that of a man suffering from a devouring terminal disease, and the whisky bottle was empty. Peter broke the seal on a fresh bottle; it would make it easier to sleep, he told himself.

  The wind came off the Irish Sea like the blade of a harvester's scythe, and the low lead-coloured cloud fled up the slopes of the Wicklow hills ahead of it.

  There were weak patches in the cloud layer through which a cold and sickly sun beamed swiftly across the green forested slopes. As it passed so the rain followed icy grey rain slanting in on the wind.

  A man came up the deserted street of the village. The tourists had not yet begun the annual invasion, but the "Bed and Breakfast"

  signs were already out to welcome them on the fronts of the cottages.

  The man passed the pub, in its coat of shocking salmon pink paint and lifted his head to read the billboard above the empty car park.

  "Black is Beautiful drink Guinness" it proclaimed, and the man did not smile but lowered his head and trudged on over the bridge that divided the village in two.

  On the stone balustrades of the bridge a midnight artist had used an aerosol paint can to spray political slogans in day-glo colours.

  "BRITS OUT" on the left-hand balustrade and "STOP BLaCK TORTURE" on the other. This time the man grimaced sourly.

  Below him the steely grey water boiled about the stone piers before hissing down towards the sea.

  The man wore a cyclist's plastic cape and a narrow brimmed tweed cap pulled down over his eyes. The wind dashed at him, flogging the skirts of the cape against his Wellington boots.

  He seemed to cringe to the wind, hunching down against its cold fury, as he trudged on past the few buildings of the village. The Street was deserted, though the man knew that he was being watched from curtained windows.

  This village on the lower slopes of the Wicklow hills, a mere thirty miles from Dublin, would not have been his choice. Here isolation worked against them, making them conspicuous. He would have preferred the anonymity of the city. However, his preferences had never been asked for.

  This was only the third time he had left the house since they had arrived. Each time it had been for some emergency something that a little more forethought might provision have prevented, which should have been included when the old house was stocked for their stay. That came from having to rely on a drinking man, but here again he had not been consulted.

  He was discontented and in a truculent, smouldering mood. it had rained most of the time, and the oil-fired central heating was not working, the only heating was the smoking peat fires in the small fireplaces in each of the two big rooms they were using. The high ceilings and sparse furnishings had made the rooms more difficult to warm and he had been cold ever since they had arrived. They were using only the two rooms, and had left the rest of the house locked and shuttered. It was a gloomy building, with the smell of damp pervading it. He had only the company of a whining alcoholic, day after cold rainy day. The man was ripe and over-ripe for trouble, for any diversion to break the grinding monotony but now he was reduced to errand boy and house servant, roles for which he was unsuited by temperament and training, and he scowled darkly as he trudged over the bridge towards the village store, with its row of petrol pumps standing before it like sentries.

  The storekeeper saw him coming, and called through into the back of the shop.

  "It's himself from down at the Old Manse." His wife came through, wiping her hands on her apron, a short plump woman with bright eyes and ready tongue.

  "City people have no more sense than they need, out in this weather."

  "Sure and it's not baked beans nor Jameson whiskey he's afteTbuying." Speculation about the new occupant of the Old Manse had swiftly become one of the village's main diversions, with regular bulletins broadcast by the girl on the local telephone exchange two overseas telephone calls, by the postman no mail deliveries, by the dustman the disposals into the dustbins were made up mainly of empty Heinz baked beans cans and Jameson whiskey bottles.

  "I still think he's from the trouble up north," said the shopkeeper's wife. "He's got the look and the sound of an Ulster man."

  "Hush, woman." Her husband cautioned her. "You'll bring bad luck upon us. Get yourself back into the kitchen now." The man came in out of the rain and swept the tweed cap off his head, beating the water from it against the jamb of the door. He had black straight hair, cut into a ragged fringe above the dark Irish visage and fierce eyes, like those of a falcon when first the leather hood is slipped.

  "The top of the morning to you, Mr. Barry," the shopkeeper greeted him heartily. "Like as not it will stop raining, before it clears."

  The man they knew as Barry grunted, and as he slipped the waterproof cape from his shoulders, swept the cluttered interior of the little general dealer's store with a quick, all, embracing glance.

  He wore a rough tweed jacket over a cable-stitched jersey and brown corduroys tucked into the top of the Wellington boots.

  "You finished writing on your book, have you?" Barry had told the milkman that he was writing a book about Ireland.

  The Wicklow hills were a stronghold of the literary profession, there were a dozen prominent or eccentric writers living within twenty miles, taking advantage of Ireland's tax concessions to writers and artists.

  "Not yet," Barry grunted, and went across to the shelves nearest the till. He made a selection of half a dozen items and laid them on the worn counter top.

  "When it's good and wrote I'm going to ask the library to keep a copy for me," the shopkeeper promised, as though that was exactly what a writer would want to hear, and began to ring up the purchases on his register.

  Barry's upper lip was still unnaturall
y smoother and paler than the rest of his face. He had shaved away the dark droopy mustache the day before arriving in the village, and at the same time had cut the fringe of his hair that hung almost to his eyes.

  The shopkeeper picked up one of the purchases and looked inquiringly at Barry, but when the dark Irish face remained impassive and he volunteered no explanation, the shopkeeper dropped his eyes self-consciously and rang up the package with the other purchases and dropped it into a paper carrier.

  "That will be three pounds twenty pence," he said, and closed the cash drawer with a clang, waiting while Barry stung the cape over his shoulders and adjusted the tweed cap.

  "God be with you then, Mr. Barry." There was no reply and the shopkeeper watched him set off back across the bridge before he called his wife again.

  "He's a surly one, all right, he is."

  "He's got him a girlfriend down there." The shopkeeper was bursting with the importance of his discovery. "He's up to a nice little bit of hanky-panky."

  "How do you know that?"

  "He was after buying women's things you know." He hooded a knowing eye.

  "No, I don't know, "his wife insisted.

  "For the curse you know. Women's things," and his wife glowed with the news, and began to untie her apron.

  "You're sure now? "she demanded.

  "Would I ever be lying to you?"

  "I think I'll go across to Mollie for a cup pa tea," said his wife eagerly; the news would make her the woman of the hour throughout the village.

  The man they knew as Barry trudged into the narrow, high-walled lane that led up to the Old Manse. It was only the heavy boots and voluminous cape that gave him a clumsy gait, for he was a lithe, lean man in prime physical condition, and under the brim of his cap the eyes were never still, hunter's eyes probing and darting from side to side.

  The wall was twelve feet high, the stonework blotched with silver-grey lichen, and although it was cracked and sagging at places, yet it was still substantial and afforded complete privacy and security to the property beyond.