Angel Eyes (4 page)

"But those two-"

"What did they see? They can't know what we're up to. Forget them. They were probably tourists who wandered down here for a thrill and a shiver in the dark.''

"Shit."

Then the light was gone, replaced by a glow in the tiny chamber, swiftly fading. Darkness descending, Ariel and Tori waited.

Ariel started to move, but Tori put one hand on his shoulder, a finger pressed gently to his lips.

Across the littered floor the rat was back, its bright, beady eyes shining, and Tori saw in their depths the possibility of betrayal. If the rat squealed now, and if, as she suspected, the Japanese were waiting with their light off just inside the adjoining chamber, then they would know that they had not been alone with the cairn of skeletons, and spirits or no spirits, the hail of machine-pistol fire would come, the end.

Tori continued to watch the rat as it made its circuitous way toward them through the maze of bones. It was clear now that the rodent scented them, and it was hungry.

Tori waited, patient, closing her eyes to slits. Her right hand lay relaxed along the line of Ariel's hip. The rat was very close now, and Tori, without seeming to move any other part of her body, whipped her right hand out to the rat and, in the same motion, neatly snapped its neck.

Time passed. Tori let her consciousness drift off. Semiawake, but with her senses more alert than before, she heard the tiny scraping sounds the Japanese made when they gave up their vigil, clambering back through the succession of chambers into the more familiar corridor.

Tori's lips touched Ariel's neck, and together they rose from the dead.

Ariel and Tori were standing on one of the two terra-cotta tile balconies of Ariel's magnificent house on Russian Hill in San Francisco. One hundred years ago Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain frequently met in a cool salon atop this nearly vertical hill.

It was not quite forty-eight hours since the incident in the eighteenth century Jesuit tunnels. Ariel, who had been returning home, had invited Tori to accompany him, and she had accepted because she found that she had lost her taste both for Buenos Aires and solitude. Besides, though she was reluctant to admit it, Ariel intrigued her. Reluctant, because for so long she had gone out of her way to avoid even a hint of a relationship or complication with a man. But she had been presented with an enigma: what was a pair of Japanese Yakuza assassins doing in the tunnels beneath Buenos Aires, and how did Ariel Solares, the man who had told her so glibly that his life was prosaic, know they would be there?

Tori looked down. Below them, the city of hills swept away to the foot of Hyde Street and, beyond, the gray bay, dotted now with ships, where, no doubt, unseen dolphins played. The house's other terrace overlooked Lombard Street as it wound its serpentine way down to North Beach.

Behind them, filling up Ariel's vast living room, were mementos of the ancient civilizations of South America: painted pottery, carved stone statues of women and animals, diminutive wooden weapons set with blackened iron tips Tori knew had once been dipped in poison.

" 'Through the years,' " Ariel Solares said, " 'a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdohis, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people.' " He was quoting a fragment of Jorge Luis Borges that Tori knew.

"This is the perfect spot," she said. "Away from everyone, above everything.''

"My only regret," Ariel said, "is that I'm not here nearly enough." He turned to her, refilled her glass with more champagne. "Are you familiar with San Francisco?"

"Not really." Tori drank. "I'm afraid I have the native Los Angelino's reflexive distaste for it.''

"It's not bad as American cities go," Ariel said. "I'd prefer Paris, but I've got to work."

• 'Don't the French need beef?''

"Not as much as we Americans. And they're a bitch to deal with. Very picky about imported meat. I'd rather deal with the Japanese." He laughed, then shivered as a cool breeze ruffled his hair. The sun had gone down minutes ago. "Let's go in, shall we?"

She had never particularly liked San Francisco, but she was wild about Ariel's house. She had never actually been up to Russian Hill; it was like living along the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. There was a peace, an apartness, in the height and the vistas, that appealed strongly to her.

Inside, he stood so that the purple sky was reflected in his coffee-colored eyes. He seemed about to say something, then turned away.

"What is it?" Tori asked.

For a time Ariel said nothing. He looked casual and relaxed in a white sport shirt, black slacks, a natural jacket of flax and silk. He seemed genuinely disconcerted. "I want to ask you to go to bed with me, but I know I shouldn't."

Tori laughed. "Well, that's a new one-a new line, I mean."

"It isn't. At least, I didn't intend it to be." He seemed so uncomfortable that Tori considered cutting right to the heart of the matter. But then she thought that he would have to learn his lesson sometime, and that in the end he might be better off learning it from her.

"Look, you've made it obvious from the moment we met that you're attracted to me," she said seriously. "I appreciated your candor. I'm here, aren't I? Don't tell me you can't feel how attracted I am to you. What I don't understand now is the 'shouldn't' part. Why are you suddenly backing off?"

"You'd never believe me. I-" He stopped in mid-sentence. "Could we forget I ever said any of this?"

"I doubt it," Tori said, moving closer to him. "You'd better learn not to check your brains at the door before you open your mouth. You never know the trouble your own words can get you into."

"I think I'm going to be in enough trouble as it is," Ariel said.

"With whom?" Her breasts brushed against him.

"It's you, you know," Ariel said. "I'm usually a pretty fair liar. I think you bring out the best-or the worst-in me."

"Poor Ariel." Tori lifted her face to his. She could feel his heat. Her lips parted, only to be crushed beneath his.

After all the inner barriers she had erected to keep her own emotions at bay, she found it difficult to break away from him. But when at length she did, she walked away from him, stood staring at the book-lined shelves against an inner wall. Her eyes drifted over titles that had no meaning for her; her vision was filled with her own quickened pulse. Blood roared in her ears.

"Why did you do that?" Ariel asked.

Without turning around. Tori said, ''Don't come any closer.'' She knew that she had to stop this now, before she got herself into something she could not control. This man had lied to her; he had known just what he was doing, taking her down into the tunnels under Buenos Aires. The only thing left to discover was where he meant to lead her.

But all the while she could feel the heat building, a heat she felt all the way to her fingertips. Stop it! she admonished herself. Concentrate on what must be done here.

She said, "Why do you live here, and not in Virginia? Doesn't Slade require face-to-face briefings anymore?"

For a long time there was no sound in the room, then she heard Ariel moving, and a moment later music drifted through the house. Melissa Etheridge singing "Chrome Plated Heart."

He came up close behind her, said in her ear, ' 'How did you know I work for the Mall?"

Tori closed her eyes. "It wasn't just one thing. The Japanese who just happened to be in the tunnels. You said of them, 'If they catch us, they'll kill us!' Then, just now, you said you'd rather work with the Japanese. What would you know about the Japanese? But the biggest mistake you made was in not showing sufficient surprise at what I did down there: finding our hiding place, killing the rat, keeping you from making a sound when they were still out there waiting for us." At last she turned to face him. "I think it's about time you tell me what this is all about."

"Later," Ariel said. "When there's plenty of time." his lips covered hers, and this time she knew she lacked the will to break away.

She felt him around her, his arms coiling, a great masculine figure, hard and strong, a sanctuary within the heavenly aerie he had created for himself. And it was as if she had been dropped into me center of a whirlpool, in the grip of forces she could no longer hold in check. She was out of control; she knew it; and still the exhilaration rose in her, blotting out everything but Ariel.

She crushed herself against him, feeling her nipples erect, feeling the long dormant liquid heaviness in her thighs and pelvis. She trembled in his embrace, and he lifted her off her feet.

The taste of lust was in her mourn, the fire in her body given full reign, conscious thought driven away on the wings of her passion.

She was so hungry-not only her loins but her empty heart yearned to be filled again, to throb at the sight of a precious lover, to anticipate his love like the coming of night, and then to feel it gushing through her like a mountain stream at the first thaw of spring.

She wept as he kissed her breasts, her thighs, her wet sex. She murmured endearments when she, in turn, took him in her mouth, feeling him growing, growing, the taste of him intoxicating.

She cried out when he entered her, her nails scoring his back as he slid all the way up her and she was filled to bursting, her heart thundering, her thighs lifting, enclosing him. Their breaths mingled; he kissed her ears, her nose, the comers of her eyes where her flesh was as thin and soft as a baby's. He inhaled the musk at the hollow of her throat, licked the swelling tops of her breasts.

And, oh, it was good. Not only the pleasure they were creating together, but the letting go, like dancing in the rain or rushing naked into the sea. Tori's heart sighed, contented, as she was buried breathlessly toward an ending, a thunder in her soul, the sun in her eyes, the rain of their sweat flying as they ground together, the sweet collision of flesh and emotion that only making love can produce.

Then he was gasping and heaving. She felt him shudder, arch into her, and something touched her core. Everything shattered, like walking into and through a mirror, arriving at a new reality, a plane of existence once only hinted at.

"Oh, my God. . . Ohhh!"

She moved-when she could gather herself to stir again-to the beat of his heart as well as her own. The feeling was so sweet, so intense, that she felt tears come again. It was something to feel like a woman once more, soft and vulnerable. It was so different from how she had been trained: she had been instructed to become as hard as a man, so she had become harder; she had been instructed to replace emotion with logic, so she had become harder; she had been instructed to replace logic with instinct, so she had become harder still, so immersed in her studies she had no time for personal considerations. An economy of movement, speech, thought had overtaken her, defining her new life.

And everything else had withered within her. She had seen this as good, a purging, an exorcism of the toxins that had embittered her previous life, that had driven her to Japan, to a land and a philosophy that was as far as she could get from what she had once been. Up until this moment.

Now she saw the other side: how the forging of her spirit in the crucible of her extraordinary training had distanced herself from everything-the good as well as the bad-that had dwelt inside her. And she was immensely grateful to Ariel Solares for giving her back that part of herself she knew she could not live without.

She wanted to make love again, now, before thought crept back through her drunk mind, but her bladder was bursting, and she staggered naked off the sofa, down the hallway, into the bathroom.

She was finished, splashing cold water on her face, when she heard the sound. Or, perhaps, felt it would be more accurate. Her first thought was that an earthquake had hit. She lurched, grabbing onto the cool porcelain of the sink. Ariel's toothbrush rattled in its holder and a bottle of cologne crashed to the tile floor.

But dimly Tori was aware of the aftermath of a percussion. Alarm flooded through her. She pulled open the door, leaped over the shards of glass, ran down the hall.

All her senses were alert. The air was thick. Plaster dust, smoke, and me smell of burning filled the air, choking her. She smelled the acrid chemical by-products of plastique explosives.

"Ariel?" she called. Then more urgently, "Ariel!"

She found him crouched on the other side of the room. The sofa on which they had been making love but moments before was demolished, charred as if in a fire. Its pieces had been thrown halfway across the floor. The doors to the balcony had exploded outward; shards of glass glittered in the city light. There was a hole in the wall behind where the doors had been, and the cruel San Francisco evening wind whipped the tattered drapes, impaling them on the iron-tipped Amazonian spears.

Tori threw herself down beside Ariel. He was making hideous gasping sounds; he was covered in blood. She tried to hold him, but he shrugged her away, and she saw that he was desperately trying to get to something. his fingers scrabbled at a cabinet door. He fumbled it open, then seemed to lose all energy. his shoulders slumped heavily and his forehead rested against the carpet.

Tori turned him, stifled a scream. There wasn't much left of his chest. How he was still breathing, let alone able to open a cabinet, was beyond her.

Her mind refused to work. It was as if she were stuck in tar. What had happened? How could this have taken place in the few moments she had been at the other end of the house?

Ariel Solares was dying, but he did not seem focused on that; he had more urgent business. Still in her arms, he flopped like a landed fish until his right hand could reach into the cabinet. He drew out a hardwood box. It trembled in the grip of the spasm that racked him.

Then Ariel pressed the box into her hand. his lips moved, his eyes searching hers, and Tori bent down.

"What is it, Ariel?" she whispered. "Oh, my God, my God."

Because his mouth was suddenly filled with blood. Bubbles formed at the corners of his lips as he drowned in his own fluids.