At the Edge of the Sun (21 page)

It seemed forever before sense and reality returned. First the trembling stilled, then the darkness began to recede. Her mind returned, slowly at first. She was lying on her side, locked in Randall’s embrace, still clinging to him with hands and arms that were cramping with tension. He was still inside her, pressed deep, and his heart was thudding as heavily as hers. Her face was drenched in tears she never knew she’d shed.

Randall’s hands came up to smooth her short tangled hair away from her tear-swollen face. She ducked her head in unexpected shyness, but he caught her chin and lifted her face to meet his gaze.

It was a revelation to her. As his searching eyes swept over her no-doubt bedraggled appearance, it was Randall who was the surprise. There was no mockery, no reserve, no wariness in his face at all. It had been washed clean of bitterness and years of cynicism. He looked like a young man, a boy. A boy in love.

Again Maggie’s heart turned over inside her. She smiled at him then, a loving, tear-filled smile and with complete trust she put her head against his shoulder and fell instantly, prosaically asleep.

It was morning, and the bed was cold. Maggie opened her eyes and reached for Randall. He was gone.

The room was empty. No sign of a note, and his clothes were neatly folded on the dresser. He wouldn’t have gone far, she told herself, settling back against the headboard of the bed that was too big for one person.

The snow had almost stopped. She looked out the leaded casement windows to the drifting flakes that were still sauntering down with a lazy air. The narrow cobbled path along the side canal was covered with it. Maybe they could go for a long walk later, hand in hand, like normal lovers on
Christmas day. Maybe they could be normal lovers, with no more hatred or distrust coming between them.

She heard the door open behind her. It could only be Randall, and she held herself very still, willing him to come over and wake her in the best possible way.

She waited in vain. He barely made a sound, moving around the room. And then she heard the muffled scrape of the one upholstered chair in the room, the telltale squeak of aging springs.

Pulling the covers around her chilled shoulders, she looked at him, and didn’t like what she saw. He was fully dressed except for his jacket and tie. It was the old Randall. Distant, elusive, a faint shadow of mockery in his chilly eyes and thin, unsmiling mouth. The tumultuous passion of Christmas Eve might never have happened.

“Ian’s back,” he said without preamble, his voice steady.

“Nice for Holly,” Maggie observed, struggling to fight off the sense of confusion that was threatening to smother her.

“Yes,” said Randall.

The silence lengthened and grew. He couldn’t look at her, wouldn’t meet her gaze. He kept those shadowed eyes of his on the snowy canal scene outside the window, and Maggie bit back her frustration.

“Does he know anything?” she asked finally.

“Who?”

“Ian. You said he was back.”

“I didn’t see him. Signor Tonetti told me he spent the night in Holly’s room.”

“Oh.”

Randall turned from the canal and focused on a spot just above her left shoulder. “Do you want some coffee?” he inquired politely. “There’s some already made.”

Maggie sat there and counted to ten and then suddenly it began to make sense. What had he said last night? That he was tired of her hating him in the morning. Tired or not, that was what he was expecting, what he had steeled himself for.

Slowly Maggie rose from the bed. It was too cold to prance around naked, so she drew the slightly tatty green brocade bedspread around her shivering body and advanced on him, a stern expression on her face.

He watched her approach with narrowed, wary eyes, clearly not sure how to react. She stopped in front of him, glaring down.

“Randall,” she said with deceptive calm. “To quote an old song by the Shangri-las, when I say I’m in love you’d best believe I’m in love.” She dropped down into his lap, pulling the bedspread around them.

For a moment he didn’t move, he just looked at her as if she were out of her mind. Then his long, hard hands caught her arms and pulled her against him, sliding under her breast and across her smooth, naked skin with a deft sureness that left her momentarily breathless.

“Oh, yeah?” he murmured, and the chilly distance had melted away.

“Yeah,” she said, biting his earlobe. “You’re mine now, Randall. You’re going to have to get used to being pawed and molested at all hours of the day and night.” She dropped her hands down to the telltale bulge beneath his thin leather belt.

“I’ve unleashed a monster,” he said lightly, but she couldn’t miss the thread of relief in his voice.

“You have indeed.” She kissed him full on the mouth, and his tongue met hers, jousting sweetly. When she finally pulled away she was breathless and trembling. “Come back to bed, Randall,” she whispered. “We can have coffee later. Besides, you’re going to need a big breakfast.”

“I am?”

She smiled demurely. “You’re going to need your strength.” And she kissed him again.

Christmas brunch was an odd sort of affair. The four of them met in Signor Tonetti’s crowded dining room at a little before noon, with absurdly sheepish expressions on their
faces and the shadows of an energetically spent night beneath their eyes.

They were oh, so polite, Maggie thought, stifling a grin as she sipped her blessedly strong coffee. Ian and Holly kept making the most nonsensical conversation, mostly consisting of “more coffee?” “pass the sugar,” and “try the preserves.” The subject of Ian’s nonexistent army commission never came up, and Maggie assumed Holly and he must have hashed it out the night before. Among other things. The two of them sat in blissful silence, sharing the occasional embarrassed grin.

Randall was just as bad. He must be an adherent to the rule of if you can’t say anything bad about a person, don’t say anything. He sat there, brooding into his coffee, answering in monosyllables, his hand on her knee beneath the linen tablecloth.

“So what’s next?” Holly said brightly when she’d managed to wolf down an astonishing amount of sweet buns. “Anybody know where Flynn’s gone to?”

“I know,” Ian rumbled, his green eyes downcast. “Not that it makes any difference because I don’t know where the hell Cul de Sac is.”

“I do,” Randall said, all trace of abstraction leaving him. He drained his coffee, setting it down with a snap on the china saucer. Three pairs of eyes turned in his direction, but he was taking his time now, pouring himself another cup and adding an unexpected lump of sugar.

“I thought you drank your coffee black?” Maggie questioned irrelevantly.

“I do. Today I need the sugar.” His smile was just this side of a grin.

“The hell with how he drinks his goddamned coffee,” Ian exploded. “Where has Flynn gone to?”

“Ever hear of Hole in the Wall?” he countered.

“No.”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Wasn’t that the western town somewhere in the Rockies where all the outlaws hid out? Butch
Cassidy, Jesse James and the gang? And the law left them completely alone.”

“That’s what Cul de Sac is. It’s in Northern Africa, somewhere in Salambia, and it’s sort of a cross between a modern hotel and a fortress. The dregs of the earth hang out there—vacation time for terrorists.” His voice was lightly bitter.

“Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?” Holly demanded.

“What can we do? For one thing, we’re not sure where it is. For another, even if we did know, we can’t very well send bombers or an army into another country—it would be looked on as an act of war. Not that the Salambians have much of an army, but any act of aggression like that could trigger some heavy aid from Russia. We don’t dare.”

“Who’s this we, white man?” Holly demanded.

Randall shrugged. “CIA, Interpol, any of the good guys.”

“Are you one of the good guys?”

“Sometimes.”

“Can we find out where it is?” Ian intervened.

Randall’s chilly eyes met his. “Maybe. We can’t very well call on your sources, can we? Considering your recent unhappy discharge from Her Majesty’s forces I’d think the British army wouldn’t be terribly helpful. And whoever’s been feeding you information has gotten us into nothing but trouble. I doubt they’d give us much help this time.”

Ian’s face grew slightly mutinous. “Maybe that’s the best thing we can do. We … I … have been led into a trap time and time again. Maybe whoever’s been pulling the strings would want to lead us straight to the heart of the matter.”

“Maybe.”

Maggie looked at Randall with a question in her eyes. Ian didn’t know Maeve O’Connor was dead—no one did but the two of them; Maggie hadn’t even told Holly. She opened her mouth to say something, when the imperceptible shake of Randall’s elegant head shut it again, and she leaned back in the fragile chair.

“You try your sources, Ian,” Randall said, “and I’ll try mine. Maybe between the two of them we’ll come up with something.”

Ian was a perceptive man. His green eyes swept between the two of them, suspicious, wary. “I’ll find him,” he said firmly. “I have too big a score to settle with him not to.”

And Maggie, remembering Maeve’s butchered body, shivered in the bright winter sunlight.

Maggie shut her suitcase, snapping the locks with her usual efficiency, her mind on the task ahead of them. For once the four of them had worked together, pooling their information, and it had been easier than she had expected. Holly had worked the cocktail circuit, mingling with the diplomatic types that abounded in Venice. The first ambassador she’d zeroed in on had been the most helpful, possibly because he was the most besotted with Holly’s magnificent aquamarine eyes and her perfectly formed body. From him she learned the general location of Cul de Sac (in the western plains of Salambia), the average occupancy of the compound (around one hundred guests, not counting the staff), and the defenses of the place (generally impregnable).

They’d gone on from there to find that Salambia was a small, emerging nation tucked in between the starving desert vastness of Ethiopia and the equally drought-struck wastes of Somalia. In better times it had been a rich little country, with a leftist dictatorship that nevertheless respected American capitalism and the vast amounts of money the capitalist system could engender. But the drought had wiped out half the economy, and the thirty-seven attempts at a military coup had decimated the rest. Now it was just another starving Third World nation, flirting with Russia, toying with the U.S., struggling desperately to survive and not be absorbed into its more powerful neighbors.

Into this mess had come Timothy Seamus Flynn and his ilk, pouring money into President Mbubu’s coffers in return for amnesty. Murderers from all over the world could hide
out in what had started out as the first Holiday Inn in northeastern Africa. They could come and vacation, recuperate with the best of hospital care, and no one could touch them. No one, that is, until now.

Maggie had done her bit, calling Mike Jackson back in Washington. Apart from a plaintive request that she eventually come back to work, her boss at Third World Causes, Ltd., took no more than twenty-four hours to come up with the goods. The current head of operations at Cul de Sac was a retired American agent who’d turned. His code name was Lazarus, and he was considered extremely dangerous. While official Washington couldn’t sanction any sort of attack, the demise of said Lazarus would be greeted with relief and perhaps even some monetary reward.

Maggie had shrugged that one off. For the time being all they could concentrate on was finishing off Tim Flynn. There was little doubt that every inmate of Cul de Sac deserved a swift, bloody death, but Maggie didn’t feel like appointing herself judge, jury, and executioner. If Lazarus tried to stop them it would be a different matter. But their main plan was to get in, take care of Flynn, and escape without anyone being the wiser.

Ian had gone back to the little shop in the Calle del Porco. Maddelena, fresh from Christmas mass, had been stubborn and uncommunicative until Ian had suggested she might be forced to accompany them to Cul de Sac. Rather than have her incompetency revealed, she had provided the most important link in the puzzle—the current password that would get the four of them into the fortress.

Not that the four of them should go. They all knew it was stupid, but not one of them was willing to stay behind. With Maddelena an incommunicado guest of the state of Venice, there was no one to warn Lazarus and his guests that they were coming. All they needed was transportation and visas.

Randall took care of that. Maggie didn’t even want to ask how. He had connections with everyone, and whether it was the CIA, Interpol, or something more nefarious she didn’t
need to know. When he arrived back at the Palazzo Carboni with four forged passports and the information that a hired plane would be ready at noon the next day, the others had merely nodded. It was finally going down.

Maggie didn’t want to leave Venice, the decaying elegance of the Palazzo Carboni, the dark room with its sagging bed and cold floors. She didn’t want to leave the first place she’d been happy in years.

She and Randall had spent hours talking, wrapped up in the threadbare linen sheets and heavy blankets, wrapped in each other’s arms. She talked to him about growing up in Hollywood, about chasing after her feckless mother and trying to raise her younger sisters. And she finally talked, in soul-wrenching details, of Deke Robinson’s raping her when she was barely sixteen years old—a rape that had left her terrified of the dark and afraid of men. Until Randall and Gemansk, six years ago.

And he’d talked about growing up in Cambridge with his robber baron grandfather. His mother’s overwhelming philanthropic works left little time for her own family, and his father had his university dream world, where Shakespeare somehow seemed more real than his children. And Randall had grown up thinking love was taking care of the distant masses, mankind, and all its woes, that love was a Shakespeare sonnet, constant, seeking not to alter but to worship, unquestioningly. Love wasn’t need and want and anger and passion—such emotions weren’t reserved for the Carters of Cambridge.