Microsoft Word - Rogers, Rosemary - The Crowd Pleasers (57 page)

And then she heard their voices. Soft, lazy laughter first, and Anna-Maria's voice sounding husky.

"I have always wanted to make love like this-in the open and under the sun. I am glad that we found each other again, querido. Aren't you?"

Listening frozen, as if she had turned into stone herself, Anne heard Webb say, "I wasn't at all sure at first, you tawny-skinned bitch! But now-I guess I never quite got over you, Ria."

"Is that why you never married again? Even after you thought I was dead? Did you suffer when you thought you had lost me forever?"

"Goddamn you, I almost went crazy. I should have killed you when I first set eyes on you again, instead of listening to your lies!"

"But they were not all lies, and you know that now. I suffered, too. And I know what they did to you when you refused to work for them any longer, those dirty capitalist assassins! But we shall both get our revenge now, hmm?"

"I haven't yet decided if I can trust you, Ria my love. Especially since you're mixed in with a bunch of capitalist assassins yourself." Webb's voice was dry. They were both unconscious of everything but each other as Anna-Maria raised herself on one elbow to look down into his sardonic face.

"But you can trust me. Didn't I tell you that I would give you an alibi for the time that Karim ... vanished? And as for Harris Phelps and the other-pah, I spit on them! They are useful only to change the existing structure, and after that-no, you must listen to me and believe me, Webb, I am telling you all this, you see, because I know what you are! Yes, and I'll tell you something else, Harris knows, too. I was watching the monitor one night, and I heard him telling her. That bitch-that bastard Reardon's daughter. He was warning her against you, he even gave her a gun to use against you. I heard him say that you are a contract man, a man who will kill for pay. You killed some girl she knew in London, and a man called Frazier who was a CIA agent.

And you are with a Mafia, si? So what does one more killing matter? I will help you. I admit that I am jealous of her-I hate the thought that you have made love to her; I would like to see her suffer! And in any case"-her voice rose slightly, as she could read no expression in his eyes-"you can see now how dangerous she can be to you, as well as to the rest of us? I'll help you cover it up-it won't matter, we can make her disappear, too. You have to kill her to be safe, don't you see that?"

At last he sighed, putting his hand up to shade the sun from his eyes, its shadow like a bar across his face. "Okay, Ria. I guess you've got me convinced. But you'll have to tell me more about your plans, baby, You've got a little something of your own cooked up, haven't yon? And if it's profitable, I want in. We're supposed to be a team now, remember?"

Anne had started to back away, one step at a time; not able to take her eyes off their shadows; the shapes of their naked bodies lying together on the slatted boards. She was shivering -with blind terror and reaction-and part of her mind still screamed no, no, what she had heard wasn't real, wasn't true. And the other, primitive unreasoning side of her wanted to kill them both-take the gun she carried out of her purse and aim it and fire through the boards, shooting until there were no more bullets left.

She had walked into a nightmare after all.

She almost cried out when she backed into the huge rock. Her elephant hadn't brought her luck after all. For a few moments she leaned against it, trying to still the sobbing sound of her breathing, afraid that they might hear it. There was the low murmur of voices-Ria's mostly, with an occasional comment from Webb. Once, she actually heard him laugh. The sound galvanized her into moving. He could talk about killing her and laugh, admiring the other woman's clever viciousness. Everything he had done with her and said to her had been calculated pretense.

'The sun was slanting towards the horizon, and at any moment they might decide to leave. If they stood up, they would see her. Suddenly, all Anne wanted to do was to flee-as far as she could from the sound of their voices and the ugly truth. She slid around the rock, still with her back to it, feeling her way with her palms. Its rough, shell-encrusted surface stung her hands and snagged at her thin skirt. She felt very cold, with the wind biting through to her skin, and her legs felt weak.

When she reached the cave mouth it looked like the entrance to hell. It must be the smoke in the air-the sun seemed magnified, sending crimson rays all the way inside the tunnel, reflecting off salt-rime. When she forced herself to go inside again, Anne could see her elongated shadow running ahead of her. Running-get away, get away!

The thought pounded in her head like the drumbeats of blood in her temples. She mustn't get lost. One more turn and she'd be safe in the darkness again, feeling her way back to safety and sanity.

Something tripped her, and she fell, sprawling. Fortunately, the floor of the cave was sandy here, so close to the ocean that had tunneled its way through what had originally been no more than a crack in the rocks. Anne lay there, gasping for a few moments, tasting sand and salt in her mouth. When her breath came back, she scrambled painfully to her hands and knees. And then she saw, her eyes dilating with the shock of horror piled upon horror, what had tripped her. An arm-bloated and turning blue with the shreds of what had once been a shirt clinging to it. A hand with swollen fingers, extended claw-like, gold signet ring glinting dully on one finger. She recognized the ring. The decaying odor she had taken for rotting sea-kelp assailed her nostrils, making her gag before she heard herself scream. It was involuntary; the sound was torn from her throat before she could stop it. Thrown back from the walls that enclosed her to reverberate against her eardrums and III her head.

Karim. She had found Karim.

"I'M BEGINNlNC TO FEEL COLD. Look at the sun! It looks as if it's going to burst."

Ria stood up, stretching. Consciously proud of her body, she posed it against the sun. She wanted Webb to want to make love to her again. She didn't know how it had happened-perhaps it was since she had discovered that he had changed as much as she had changed-but she knew now that she wanted him for her own. He used to treat her tenderly and protectively, as if she were made of glass, but now he treated her as a woman needed to be treated-roughly and fiercely. She gloried in the fact that he was as ruthless and cynical as she was. The fact that he was an assassin, a killer for pay, only made her glad, even proud. She was sick of the effete intriguers she had had to cultivate and play along with; she had needed, all these years, to have someone like herself whom she could confide in and share with. And she admired him all the more for not having been taken in by her in the beginning. Now, at last, with all the cards on the table, they could work together.

He sat up, watching her, and she stretched again, provocatively. "Well? What shall we do now? Put on our clothes and our polite faces and go back to the others, or . . ."

Out of habit, her eyes ran up and down the beach to make sure they were alone.

Unbroken stretch of sand, marked only by the waves, except for . . . she cried out with sudden alarm and rage, "Look, Webb! There are footprints! They come up right here . . ."

And then they both heard the sound. A scream-a woman's scream, echoing hollowly.

Followed by another, and another.

"Christ!" Webb swore. There were more precarious steps, leading down from the deck onto the beach, but he seemed to uncoil his body from its semiprone position as swiftly as a leopard, poised for an instant before he sprang from the edge of the deck onto the crisp sand below. He was already running when, after a moment's hesitation, Ria followed him. Before she had left Cuba she had been trained in guerrilla fighting, and her body was lithe and firm-muscled. Her hesitation had only been to snatch up the gun she always carried with her. It had a silencer fitted, and she knew how to use it.

It was too late to blame herself for having given in to hysteria; too late already when she pressed both hands over her mouth-as much to stop herself from gagging as to cut off her own involuntary screams. Anne knew it when she saw the shadow. She scrambled to her feet and tried to run, but again it was just as if she were living out one of her nightmares. The damp sand sucked at her shoes, and he caught her and spun her around all too easily.

"What the hell were you doing, spying .. ." He sounded out of breath and furious at the same time. She managed to wrench one arm free, scrabbling in her purse for the gun in a last-ditch attempt at self-preservation. She couldn't see his face, since his back was to the crimson sunlight, but she knew that he was still naked, fresh from lying with that woman. Hate combined with primitive terror, making her keep on struggling; fighting against his cruel grip on her wrist, beating and kicking at him; biting his arm and tasting salt blood in her mouth, until swearing, he twisted her around and the purse dropped from her shoulder with everything spilling out of it. He held her against his body now, with both arms twisted up behind her back. The pain became unbearable and she opened her mouth to scream, only to feel his hand clamp over her mouth.

The sun shone in her eyes, almost blinding her through the glaze of tears, and Anna-Maria was only an outline as she drawled, "It's a good thing you've got the bitch under control, mi querido. Otherwise I'd have enjoyed shooting her. And maybe that's what we ought to do-she knows too much to let her go. We can leave her here with her dead lover, and let the crabs and the ocean take care of her."

"You're far too blood-thirsty, my love. And not too practical. Don't you think we ought to find out just who knows she came out here-first?"

Anne began to kick backwards and struggle again until she felt he would break her arms; and then she sagged against him, feeling his body against hers in a travesty of what had been between them before. The tears had begun to stream down her face now, and she was ashamed of the display of weakness.

"But she's here, and she heard us talk-we can't let her go back and tell them! We could kill her now and stuff her body back in one of those little caves-where the tide last night brought his body. See where it has become wedged in?" Anna-Maria's voice was quite normal, even casual. She might have been talking of what to do with the dirty laundry.

"The difference between a professional and an amateur lies in covering all the possibilities before you act," Webb said coldly. He still held her fast, although by now he must have sensed she was incapable of any more fight. "I'm not having anything pinned on me. So we find a safe place to stash her away until we find out if she was sent here to spy on us or came on her own-and who she told."

"What difference does it make? And where would we put her? I think it's a waste of time." Anna-Maria sounded sullen. There was vicious hatred in the look she directed at Anne. But at the same time, she had been trained to follow orders, and Webb seemed to have taken charge. As long as he was being practical, and not soft ...

Anne heard them arguing back and forth over her head, and it seemed unreal to hear herself discussed as if she weren't there.

"Ask her-ask her who knows she came out here. If she tries to scream again, I'll fix her. And if she's reluctant to talk, I know how to make her-her kind is always soft, I can tell she's not used to pain or to rough treatment."

"Shut up, Ria! We haven't got time for that. We should be getting back and establishing an alibi for ourselves. You can restrain yourself for a little while.

Afterwards ..."

The way he let his words trail off was both a threat and a promise, and Anne felt a trickle of ice run down her spine. There was death in the gun Anna-Maria carried, still pointed at her. Death and betrayal in the way Webb held her.

In the end it was he who came up with a solution. "The boat. It has a canvas cover.

And it's hardly likely anyone would think of looking there. In any case, the tide's already starting to come back in, and it'll wash away all the footprints on the beach. If we can make it seem like she was scared and decided to run away .. ."

Anna-Maria's smile wasn't really a smile at all. A cruel curving of her lips that showed her strong white teeth. "How very clever of you, darling! Yes, that's it. And I can tell we are going to work very well together."

Craig Hyatt had spent most of the afternoon watching video-tapes. He knew that the monitoring system had broken down during last night's storm; but they had a couple of pretty good Sony machines that operated with any television set. Harris Phelps was downstairs with Yves Pleydel, trying to calm everyone down, and it was Sal Espinoza who was obliging enough to bring up a selection of tapes from the vault.

"While everyone else is busy, you might want to catch up on the action you've been missing," he said with one of his lazy smiles.

Tactfully, then, he had left Craig alone. And with reason. Apart from certain other episodes, they were mostly of Anne. Not the passive, cold creature he remembered from the days of their marriage. The woman he watched seemed to be a different being altogether-a wildly passionate, sensual female who gave as much as she took.

Who seemed to have lost all modesty and reserve. He watched her with the Egyptian, Karim, hardly able to believe it was the same shy, inhibited girl he had married and taken as a virgin-tried to arouse. She seemed drugged with passion ...

And then he watched her with Webb Carnahan, volume turned up, perversely. So that was how she could be-how she needed to be treated. Like a whore ... His palms were sweating, and he felt an ache in his groin. So that was how he should have treated her, instead of trying to be patient and tender. She'd leaned against him, unresisting, when he'd offered to take her away. An act, or genuine?

Find out, his senses told him. Find out! Down one floor and down a short corridor.

This big mausoleum of a house reminded him of an old hotel he'd once stayed in.

Why did some people choose to build mansions to live in? And now all this belonged to Anne-through the generosity of Harris Phelps, who had made sure his room adjoined hers ... Phelps hadn't seemed to mind his turning up. Maybe they had one of those modem arrangements that were so fashionable in some international circles.