Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (57 page)

‘
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 Savil
l
e 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
back
ground of
unctuous
w
hispering 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
M
inkes 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 A
m
ex. The big oil company simply ignored
invitations to debate the charges on radio or television, and
stone-walled questions from the media.

I
t'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.
I
f they're lucky I'll call them back.
’