Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (184 page)

"Oh, I know as much about you as you do yourself," she laughed. "Do you like it?"

"It is magnificent. I am speechless." The gift was too extravagant, even for someone of her fortune. It troubled him, and he was reminded of the comedy situation of the husband who brings home flowers unexpectedly and is immediately accused by his wife. "Why do you have a guilty conscience?"

"Do you truly like it? I know so little about books."

"It is the one edition I need to complete my major works," he said. "And it is probably the finest specimen left outside the British Museum." "I'm so glad." She was genuinely relieved. "I was truly worried." And she put down the silver soup ladle and lifted both arms to welcome his embrace.

During the meal she was gay and talkative, and only when Roberto had wheeled away the trolley and they settled side by side on the down-filled couch before the fire did her mood change again.

"Peter, today I have been unable to think of anything but this business you and me and Caliph. I have been afraid, and I am still afraid. I keep thinking of Aaron, what they did to him and then I think of you and what nearly happened." They were silent, staring into the flames and sipping
"JAVA
coffee from the demi-tosses, then suddenly she had changed direction again. He was growing accustomed to these mercurial switches in thought.

"I have an island not one island, but nine little islands and in the cintre of them is a lagoon nine kilometres wide. The water is so clear you can see the fish fifty feet down. There is an airstrip on the main atoll. just under two hours" flying time to Tahiti. Nobody would ever know we were there. We could swim all day, walk in the sand, make love under the stars. You would be king of the islands, and I would be your queen. No more Altmann Industries I would find somebody as good or better than myself to run it. No more danger. No more fear. No more Caliph no more-" She stopped abruptly, as though she had been about to commit herself too far, but she went on quickly.

"Let's go there, Peter. Let's forget all this. Let's just run away and be happy together, for ever."

"It's a pretty thought." He turned to her, feeling deep and genuine regret.

"It would work for us. We would make it work." And he said nothing, just watching her eyes, until she looked away and sighed.

"No." She mirrored his regret. "You are right. Neither of us could ever give up living like that. We have to go on but, Peter, I am so afraid. I am afraid of what I know about you and of what I do not know. I am afraid of what you do not know about me, and what I never can tell you but we must go on. You are right. We have to find Caliph, and then destroy him. But, oh God, I pray we do not destroy ourselves, what we have found together I pray we will be able to keep that intact."

"The best way to conjure up emotional disaster is to talk about it."

"All right, let's play riddles instead. My turn first. What is the most miserable experience known to the human female?"

"I
give up."

"Sleeping alone on a winter's night."

"Salvation is at hand, "he promised her.

"But what about your poor shoulder?"

"If we combine our vast talents and wisdom, I am sure we will manage something."

"I think you are right," she purred and nestled against him like a sleek and silken cat. "As always." There is always a delightfully decadent feeling about buying underwear for a beautiful woman, and Peter was amused by the knowing air of the middle-aged sales lady. She clearly had her own ideas about the relationship, and slyly produced a tray filled with filmy lace and iniquitously expensive wisps of silk.

"Yes," Melissa Jane approved rapturously. "Those are exactly-" She held one of them to her cheek, and the sales lady preened at her own foresight. Peter hated to disillusion her, and he played the role of sugar-daddy a few moments longer as he glanced up at the mirror behind her head.

The tail was still there, a nondescript figure in a grey overcoat, browsing through a display of brassieres across the hall with the avid interest and knowledgeable air of a closet queen.

"I don't really think your mother will approve, darling," Peter said, and the sales woman looked startled.

"Oh, please, Daddy. I will be fourteen next month." They had had a tail on him since he had arrived at Heathrow the previous afternoon, and Peter could not decide who they were. He began to regret he had not yet replaced the Cobra he had lost in the river.

"I think we'd better play it safe-" Peter told his daughter, and both Melissa-Jane and the sales lady looked crestfallen.

"Not bloomers!" Melissa-Jane wailed. "Not elastic legs."

"Compromise," Peter suggested. "No elastic legs but no lace, not until you're sixteen. I think painted fingernails is enough for right now."

"Daddy, you can be so medieval, honestly!" He glanced at the mirror again, and they were changing the guard across the sales hall. The man in the shabby grey overcoat and checked woollen scarf drifted away and disappeared into one of the lifts. It would take some little time for Peter to spot his replacement and then he grinned to himself-, no it would not. Here he came now. He wore a tweed sports jacket in a frantic hounds tooth pattern, above Royal Stewart tartan trews and a grin like an amiable toad.

"Son of a gun. This is a surprise." He came up behind Peter and hit him an open-handed blow between the shoulder blades that made Peter wince. At least he knew who they were at last.

"Colin." He turned and took the massive paw with its covering of wiry black hair across the back. "Yes, it is a surprise. I've been falling over your gorillas since yesterday." oafs" Colin Noble agreed amiably. "All of them, oafs!" And turned to seize Melissa-Jane. "You're beautiful, he told her and kissed her with more than avuncular enthusiasm.

"Uncle Colin. You come straight from heaven." Melissa Jane broke from the embrace and displayed the transparent panties. "What do you think of these?"

"It's you, honey. You've just got to have them." "Tell my father, won't you?" Colin looked around the Dorchester suite and grunted. "This is really living. You don't get it this good in this man's army."

"Daddy is truly becoming a bloated plutocrat just like Uncle Steven, "Melissa-jane agreed.

"I notice that you and Vanessa and the other comrades all wear lace panties," Peter counter-attacked his daughter.

"That's different." Melissa-Jane back-tracked swiftly, and hugged the green Harrod's package defensively. "You can have a social conscience without dressing like a peasant, you know."

"Sounds like a good life." Peter threw his overcoat across the couch and crossed to the liquor cabinet. "Bourbon?"

"On the rocks," said Colin.

"Is there a sweet sherry?" Melissa-Jane asked.

"There is Coke," Peter answered. "And you can take it through to your own room, young lady."

"Oh Daddy, I haven't seen Uncle Colin for ages."

"Scat, said Peter, and when she had gone, sweet sherry, forsooth."

"It's a crying bastard when they start growing up and they look like that." Colin took the glass from Peter and rattled the ice cubes together as he lay back in the armchair.

"Aren't you going to congratulate me?"

"With pleasure." Peter took his own glass and stood at the windows, against the backdrop of bare branches and grey misty skies over Hyde Park. "What did you do?"

"Come on, Pete! Thor they gave me your job, after you walked out."

"Before they fired me."

"After you walked out," Colin repeated firmly. He took a sip of the Bourbon and gargled it loudly. "There are a lot of things we don't understand "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die." Shakespeare." He was still playing the buffoon, but the small eyes were as honey bright and calculating as those of a brand new teddy bear on Christmas morning. Now he waved his glass around the suite.

"This is great. Really it's great. You were wasted in Thor everybody knew that. You must be pulling down more than all the joint-chiefs put together now."

"Seven gets you five that you've already seen a Xeroxed copy of my contract of employment with Narmco." "Narmco!" Colin whistled. "Is that who you're working for? No kidding, Pete baby, that's terrific!" And Peter had to laugh, it was a form of capitulation.

He came across and took the seat opposite Colin.

"Who sent you, Colin?"

"That's a lousy question-"

"That's just an opener."

"Why should somebody have sent me? Couldn't I just want to chew the fat with an old buddy?"

"He sent you because he worked it out that I might bust the jaw of anybody else."

"Sure now and everybody knows we love each other like brothers."

"What's the message, Colin?" "Congratulations, Peter baby, I am here to tell you that you have just won yourself a return ticket to the Big Apple." He placed one hand across his heart and sang with a surprisingly mellow baritone. "New York, New York, it's a won erful town." Peter sat staring impassively at Colin, but he was thinking swiftly. He knew he had to go. Somehow he was certain that something was surfacing through muddied waters, the parts were beginning to click together. This was the sort of thing he had hoped for when he put the word on the wind.

"When?"

"There is an airforce jet at Croydon right now." "Melissa-Jane?"

"I've got a driver downstairs to take her home."

"She's going to hate you."

"Story of my life," Colin sighed. "Only the dogs love me." They played gin-rummy and drank teeth-blackening airforce coffee, all the way across the Atlantic.

Colin Noble did most of the talking, around the stub of his cheroot. It was shop, Thor shop, training and personnel details, small anecdotes about men and things they both knew well and he made no effort to question Peter about his job and Narmco, other than to remark that he would have Peter back in London for the series of Narmco meetings he had arranged starting on the following Monday. It was a deliberate and not very subtle intimation of just how much Atlas knew about Peter and his new activities.

They landed at Kennedy a little after midnight, and there was an army driver to take them to a local Howard Johnson for six hours" sleep, that kind of deep black coma induced by jet-lag.

Peter still felt prickly-eyed and woollen-headed as he watched with a feeling of disbelief as Colin devoured one of those amazing American breakfasts of waffles and maple syrup, wieners and bacon and eggs, sugar cakes and sticky buns, washed down with countless draughts of fruit juice and coffee. Then Colin lit his first cheroot and announced, "Hell, now I know I'm home. Only now I realize I've been slowly fading away with malnutrition for two years." The same army driver was waiting for them at the front entrance of the motel. The Cadillac was an indication of their status in the military hierarchy. Peter looked out with detachment from the air-conditioned and padded interior onto the brooding ghettoes of Harlem. From the elevated highway along the East River, it reminded Peter of a deserted battle ground where a few survivors lurked in dark doorways or scuttled along the littered and pitted sidewalks in the cold misty morning. Only the graffiti that adorned the bare brick walls had passion and vitality.

Their drive caught the junction of Fifth and One Hundred and Eleventh Street, and ran south down the park past the Metropolitan Art Museum in the thickening rush, hour traffic, then slipped off and into the cavernous mouth of a parking garage beneath one of the monolithic structures that seemed to reach to the grey cold heavens.

The garage entrance was posted "Residents Only', but the doorman raised the electronically controlled grid and waved them through. Colin led Peter to the bank of elevators and they rode up with the stomach-dropping swoop while the lights above the elevator door recorded their ascent to the very top of the building.

There they stepped out into a reception area protected by ornamental, but none the less functional screens.

A guard in military police uniform and wearing a sidearm surveyed them through the grille and checked Colin's Atlas pass against his register before allowing them through.

The apartment occupied the entire top level of the building, for there were hanging gardens beyond the sliding glass panels and a view across the sickening canyons of space to the other tall structures farther down Island the Pan Am building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

The decor was Oriental, stark interiors in which were displayed works of art that Peter knew from his previous visit were of incalculable value antique Japanese brush paintings on silk panels, carvings in jade and ivory, a display of tiny netsuke and in an atrium through which they passed was a miniature forest of Bonsai trees in their shallow ceramic bowls, the frozen contortions of their trunks and branches a sign of their great age.

Incongruously, the exquisite rooms were filled with the thunder of von Karajan leading the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra through the glories of the Eroica.

Beyond the atrium was a plain door of white oak, and Colin Noble pressed the buzzer beside the lintel and almost immediately the door slid open.

Colin led into a long carpeted room, the ceiling of which was covered with acoustic tiles. The room contained besides the crowded bookshelves and work table an enormous concert piano, and down the facing wall an array of hi-fi turntables and loudspeakers that would have been more in place in a commercial recording studio.

Kingston Parker stood beside the piano, a heroic figure, tall and heavy in the shoulder, his great shaggy head hanging forward onto his chest, his eyes closed and an expression of almost religious ecstasy glowing upon his face.

The music moved his powerful frame the way the storm wind sways a giant of the forest. Peter and Colin stopped in the doorway, for it seemed an intrusion on such a private, such an intimate moment, but it was only a few seconds before he became aware of them and lifted his head. He seemed to shake off the spell of the music with the shudder that a spaniel uses to shake itself free of water when it reaches dry land, and he lifted the arm of the turntable from the spinning black disc.