Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (187 page)

Across the ormolu Louis Quatorze desk Magda was pale, tense, and she did not have to ask the question, it was in the eyes that seemed too large for her face.

He did not have to reply to that question. He nodded once, an abrupt jerky motion, and then he dialled again and while he waited he could not take his eyes from the macabre trophy that stood in its bottle in the centre of the desk.

"Colonel Noble." Peter snapped into the mouthpiece.

"Tell him it's General Stride and it's urgent."

Colin came on within a minute. ""They've taken Melissa-Jane."

"Who? I don't understand."

"The enemy. They've taken her."

"Jesus God! Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. They sent me her finger in a bottle." Colin was silent for a few seconds, and then his voice was subdued. "That's sick. Christ, that's really sick."

"Get onto the police. Use all your clout. They must be keeping quiet on it. There has been no publicity.

I want to be in on the hunt for these animals. Get Thor involved, find out what you can. I'm on my way now. I'll let you know what flight I am on."

"I'll keep a listening watch at this number round the clock, Colin promised. "And I'll have a driver meet you." Colin hesitated. "Peter, I'm sorry. You know that."

"Yes. I know."

"We will all be with you, all the way." Peter dropped the receiver onto its arm, and across the desk Magda stood up resolutely.

"I'll come with you to London, she said, and Peter reached out and took her hand.

"No," he said gently. "Thank you, but no. There will be nothing for you to do."

"Peter, I want to be with you through this terrible thing.

I feel as though it's all my fault."

"That's not true."

"She's such a lovely child."

"You will be more help to me here, said Peter firmly.

"Try through all your sources, any little scrap of information." "Yes, very well." She accepted the decision, without further argument. "Where can I find you if I have anything?" He gave her Colin Noble's private number at Thor, scribbling it on the pad beside the telephone. "Either there or at the Dorchester," he said.

"At least I will come with you as far as Paris," she said.

Heathrow Airport. It was on the front page of the Evening Standard and Peter snatched a copy off the news Stand and read it avidly during the drive up to London.

The victim was abducted At the front gate of her home in Leaden Street, Cambridge at eleven o'clock on Thursday. A neighbour saw her speak to the occupants of a maroon Triumph saloon car, and then enter the back door of the vehicle, which drove off immediately.

"I thought there were two people in the car," Mrs. Shirley Callon, 32, the neighbour, told our correspondent, and Melissa-Jane did not seem alarmed. She appeared to enter the Triumph quite willingly. I know that her father, who is a senior officer in the army, often sends different cars to fetch her or bring her home. So I thought nothing about it." The alarm was not raised for nearly twenty-four hours, as the missing girl's mother also believed that she might be with her ex-husband.

Only when she was unable to contact Major -General Stride, the girl's father, did she inform the police. The Cambridge police found a maroon Triumph abandoned in the car park at Cambridge railway station. The vehicle had been stolen in London the previous day, and immediately a nation-wide alert was put in force for the missing girl.

Chief-Inspector-Alan Richards is the police officer in charge of the investigation and any person who may be able to provide information should telephone There followed a London number and a detailed description of Melissa-Jane and the clothes she was wearing at the time she disappeared.

Peter crumpled the newspaper and dropped it on the front seat. He sat staring ahead, cupping his anger to him like a flame, husbanding it carefully because the heat was infinitely more bearable than the icy despair which waited to engulf him.

Inspector Alan Richards was a wiry little man, more like a jockey than a policeman. He had a prematurely wizened face, and he had combed long wisps of hair across his balding pate to disguise it. Yet his eyes were quick and intelligent, and his manner direct and decisive.

He shook hands when Colin Noble introduced them. "I must make it very clear that this is a police matter, General.

However, in these very special circumstances I am prepared to work very closely with the military." Swiftly Richards went over the ground he had already covered. He had mounted the investigation from the two offices set aside for him on the third floor of Scotland Yard, with a view over chimney pots of the spires of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

Richards had two young policewomen answering the telephone calls coming in through the number they had advertised in the Press and on television. So far they had accepted over four hundred of these. "They range from long shots to the completely crazy, but we have to investigate all of them." For the first time his expression softened. "It's going to be a long, slow process, General Stride, but we have a few more leads to follow come through." The inner office was furnished in the same nondescript Public Works Department furniture, solid and characterless but there was a kettle boiling on the gas ring, and Richards poured the tea as he went on.

"Three of my men are taking the kidnap car to pieces.

We are sure it is the right car. Your ex-wife has identified a purse found on the floor of the vehicle. It is your daughter's.

We have lifted over six hundred fingerprints, and these are now being processed. It will take some time until we can isolate each and hope for an identification of any alien prints.

However, two of these correspond to prints lifted from your daughter's room Sugar? Milk?" Richards brought the cup to Peter as he went on.

The neighbour, Mrs. Callon, who saw the pick-up, is working on an identikit portrait of the driver, but she did not get a very good view of him. That is a very long shot." Richards sipped his tea. "However, we will show the final picture on television and hope for another lead from it. I am afraid that in cases like this, this is all we can do. Wait for a tip, and wait for the contact from the kidnappers. We do not expect the contact will be made through your ex wife but of course we have a tap on her telephone and men watching over her." Richards spread his hands. "That's it, General Stride. Now it's your turn. What can you tell us?

Why should anybody want to snatch your daughter?" Peter exchanged a glance with Colin Noble, and was silent as he collected his thoughts, but Inspector Richards insisted quietly: "I understand you are not a very wealthy man, General but your family? Your brother?" Peter dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. "My brother has children of his own. They would be the more logical targets."

"Vengeance? You were very active against the Provos in Ireland. You commanded the recapture of Flight 070."

"It's possible."

"You are no longer connected with the army, I understand." Peter was not going to be drawn further in that direction.

"I do not think this type of guesswork will profit us much.

We will know the motive as soon as the kidnappers make their demands known."

"That is true." Richards rattled his teacup, a little nervous gesture. "They could not have sent you her" He broke off as he saw Peter's expression change.

It is horrible and terribly distressing, but we have to accept the finger as proof that your daughter is still alive and that the contact, when it comes, will be made to you. It was an expression of their earnest intention, and a threat but-" The telephone on his desk rang shrilly and Richards snatched it up.

"Richards!" he snapped, and then listened at length, occasionally grunting encouragement to the caller. When he hung up the receiver he did not speak immediately, but offered Peter a rumpled pack of cigarettes. When Peter refused, the policeman lit one himself and his voice was diffident.

"That was the laboratory. You know your daughter was a white cell donor, don't you?" Peter nodded. It was part of Melissa-Jane's social commitment. If she had not been tactfully dissuaded, she would have donated her blood and marrow by the bucketful.

"We were able to get a tissue typing from the Cambridge hospital. The amputated finger matches your daughter's tissue type. I'm afraid we must accept that it is hers I cannot imagine that the kidnappers would have gone to the lengths of finding a substitute of the same type." Peter had been secretly cherishing the belief that it was a bluff. That he had been sent the fingertip from a corpse, from a medical sample, from the casualty ward of a city hospital and now as that hope died he was assailed by the cold spirit-sapping waves of despair. They sat in silence for fully a minute, and now it was Colin Noble who broke it.

"Inspector, you are aware of the nature of the Thor Command?" "Yes, of course. There was a great deal of publicity at the time of the Johannesburg hijacking. It is an anti-terrorist unit."

"We, are probably the most highly trained specialists in I'm sorry, General.
the world at removing hostages safely from the hands of militants--"

"I understand what you are trying to tell me, Colonel," Richards murmured drily. "But let us track down our militants first, and then any rescue attempts will be entirely under the control of the Commissioner of Police." It was after three o'clock in the morning when Peter Stride checked in with the night receptionist at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane.

"We have been holding your suite since midday, General."

"I'm sorry." Peter found himself slurring his words, exhaustion and nervous strain, he realized. He had only left Police Headquarters when he could convince himself that everything possible was being done, and that he could place complete trust in Chief-Inspector Richards and his team.

He had Richards's solemn undertaking that he would be informed, no matter at-what time of day or night, as soon as there was any new development.

Now he signed the register, blinking at the gritty swollen feeling of his eyelids.

"There are these messages for you, General."

"Thank you again, and goodnight." In the elevator he glanced at the mail the clerk had given him.

The first was a telephone slip.

"Baroness Altmann asks you to return her call to either the Paris or Rambouillet number." The second was another telephone slip.

"Mrs. Cynthia Barrow called. Please call her at Cambridge 699 313." The third was a sealed envelope, good-quality white paper, undistinguished by crest or monogram.

His name had been printed in capitals, very regular Win lettering, an old-fashioned copper-plate script. No stamp, so it would have been delivered by hand.

Peter split the flap with his thumb, and withdrew a single sheet of lined writing paper, again good but undistinguished.

There would be a stack of these sheets in any stationery department throughout the United Kingdom.

The writing was the same regular, unnatural script, so that Peter realized that the writer had used a stencil to form each letter, one of those clear plastic cut-out stencils obtainable from any toy store or stationery department. A completely effective method of disguising handwriting.

A finger you have already, next you will have the hand, then another hand, then a foot, then another foot and at last the head.

The next package will arrive on April 20th, and there will be another delivery every seven days.

To prevent this you must deliver a life for a life. The day Dr. Kingston Parker dies, your daughter will return to you immediately, alive and suffering no further harm, Destroy this letter and tell nnobody, or the head will be delivered immediately.

The letter was signed with the name which had come to loom so largely in Peter's life:

"CALIPH'

The shock of it seemed to reach to the extremities of his soul. To see the name written. To have complete confirmation of all the evil that they had suspected, to see the mark of the beast deeply printed and unmistakable.

The shock was made greater, almost unbearable, by the contents of the letter. Peter found that such cruelty, such utter ruthlessness, tested his credibility to its limits.

The letter was fluttering in his hands, and he realized with a start of surprise that he was shaking like a man in high fever. The porter carrying his black crocodile valise was staring at him curiously, and it required a huge physical effort to control his hands and fold the sheet of white paper.

He stood rigidly, as though on the parade ground, until the elevator door opened and then he marched stiffly down the passage to his suite. He gave the porter a banknote, without glancing at it, and the moment the latch clicked closed, he unfolded the sheet again, and standing in the centre of the living-room floor, scanned the stilted script again, and then again until the words seemed to melt together and lose coherence and meaning.

He realized that for the first time in his life he was in complete panic, that he had lost all resolution and direction.

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.