Night of the Condor (3 page)

Or she could simply arrive there, she thought. It wouldn't be an easy trip, but she couldn't imagine she would be turned away once she had managed the journey.

She gave a determined nod. Tomorrow she would go to the Peruvian Quest offices and make radio contact with Fergus Willard. Once she had won him over, it would just be a question of hiring the best guide, and the best transport her money could obtain.

She squared her shoulders. But if she had to fight every battle alone, then she would do so. And Rourke Martinez—or anyone else for that matter—would not defeat her.

She swallowed suddenly, remembering with painful clarity those last contemptuous words he had flung at her.

I'll make him sorry, she vowed silently. I'll make him sorry he was ever born!

The Peruvian Quest offices lay in a quiet side street.

Leigh stood for a moment, watching the cab which had brought her there drive off. She was sure she had been overcharged for such a comparatively modest journey, but there had been no meter in the cab for her to check with. No meter, and very little else that worked either, she thought with a kind of desperate hilarity, but most of the cabs she had seen cruising around had been in the same ramshackle state.

She wished she had taken up the hotel's offer to hire a car for her. It would surely have been in better condition, and maybe the driver wouldn't have looked like a brigand either, she thought with a slight shiver.

More than once, she had caught him staring insolently at her in his mirror, and he had tossed a couple of remarks at her which she hadn't been able to understand, but which instinct warned her were of a frankly sexual nature.

Last night, in the hotel dining-room, she had been openly stared at as she tried to eat her meal, and one man from a party of four near the door had tried to accost her as she left. She had shaken him off with a blazing look, and gone straight to her room, abandoning any notion of seeing what facilities the hotel had to offer during the evenings.

Under the circumstances, she had slept quite well, but today she was aware of a slight persistent head-ache, no doubt a legacy from her long plane trip.

The
garua
still held the city in its clammy grip too, which was disappointing, and although it was very humid, she was beginning to wish she had brought some warmer clothes.

Leigh walked across the uneven paving-stones and tried the heavy outer door of the building. It opened at once, and she found herself in a narrow passage facing an old-fashioned lift. On her right was a rudimentary reception counter surmounted by a grille with an ornate bellpush. She rang and waited, but no one came, and after a brief hesitation, she decided to trust herself to the lift.

Gingerly, she closed the gate and pressed the button. The lift seemed to stir and shake itself like a grumpy animal being poked with a stick, then with a heart-stopping lurch it began its upward journey.

It stopped equally abruptly, nearly throwing her off balance, but she seemed to have arrived at the first floor, so she supposed she had to be grateful for small mercies.

The narrow passage seemed a facsimile of the one downstairs, except that the reception area had been replaced by a pair of double doors. It was plainly the sole option, so she knocked briefly and walked in.

She stopped dead. Just for a moment, it seemed as if the door led nowhere, and she had fallen off the edge of the world. Then she realised that what was confronting her was a gigantic aerial photograph of part of the Andes range. She caught her breath as she studied it. Savagely sculpted peaks reared towards the pale sky, intersected by gorges, and swooping down to the unimaginable depths of chasms where slender rivers ran. Some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, she had heard it said, and Evan—her Evan—was out there somewhere—alone.

She supposed Atayahuanco was somewhere in the photograph, hidden in the indigo shade of one of those deep valleys, and the realisation of what was facing her made her feel suddenly nauseated.

It wouldn't have taken much to persuade her to forget the whole thing, she thought with a shudder. She was no climber. In fact she was hardly the outdoor type at all. And neither was Evan, she reminded herself.

She closed her eyes momentarily, taking a grip on herself. She loved Evan. She had endured their separation, and it would take more than a little physical hardship to keep him from her now.

She heard a polite cough, and opened her eyes to find a young woman neatly dressed in a dark skirt and white blouse standing looking at her enquiringly.

Leigh marshalled one of her few Spanish phrases. '
Habla usted Ingl
é
s
?' she asked hopefully, and was rewarded by a nod and a smile.

'I speak it well. How may I help you,
se
ň
orita
?'

Leigh decided not to beat about the bush. She said, 'I understand you're in radio contact with the camp at Atayahuanco. I was wondering if I could send a message through.'

The girl looked puzzled. 'There is no radio here,
seňorita
. We have another office in Cuzco, and all messages go from there. But the use of the radio is— restricted, I think.'

'I'm sure it is.' Leigh's own smile didn't slip. 'But you see, I need to contact Doctor Willard urgently, and I don't know any other way of doing it.'

The girl's face cleared. 'Doctor Willard? Ah, but that is not possible,
seňorita
. Doctor Willard is ill with a fever. The camp is under the direction of Doctor Martinez, and he is here in Lima at this time. You may speak with him directly.'

Leigh groaned inwardly. 'Oh, I don't think there's any need for that,' she said, trying to sound casual. 'Actually, I was hoping to go to the camp, and I just wanted to warn someone that I was on my way, that's all'

The girl gaped at her. 'Go-up to Atayahuanco?' She shook her head. 'Impossible.'

'Hardly,' said Leigh with determined amiability. 'This—Doctor Martinez seems to manage it.' She remembered something he'd said. 'How do supplies go in? Isn't there a helicopter, or something?'

'
Si, seňorita
. But this month it has already made its trip.'

'Then what do you suggest?' Leigh asked.

The girl shrugged. 'Me, I would not go,' she said with total seriousness.

Leigh held on to her temper. 'Doctor Martinez— how will he travel?'

The girl moved her shoulders again with growing reluctance. 'From Cuzco,
seňorita
, he goes by jeep, and later by mule. But then,' she added, a disturbingly dreamy expression crossing her face, 'Doctor Martinez is a man, and very strong, and altogether unafraid.'

'And when he needs to cross a river, I suppose he walks on water,' muttered Leigh. She saw the other girl looked astonished, and waved a dismissive hand. 'Oh, let it pass.' Her mind was moving rapidly, weighing the various possibilities, and realising with increasing foreboding that the most direct route to Atayahuanco, little though she might relish it, lay in the company of the loathsome Martinez man.

And, of course, he's so likely to welcome me as a travelling companion, she thought despondently. If I'd known, I might have been nicer to the pig.

As it was, she seemed to have burned her boats pretty comprehensively where he was concerned.

Or had she?

She gritted her teeth. 'Is Doctor Martinez here?'

The girl glanced at her watch. 'He is expected,
seňorita
, but when it is impossible to say, you understand.'

'Well, I'll wait for a while, if that's all right.'

'As you wish.' The girl indicated a high-backed chair near the window, and offered coffee which Leigh declined. She withdrew then to some inner office, and Leigh could hear the sound of a typewriter through the closed door.

By the time an hour and a half had passed, she felt she could have drawn the aerial photograph from memory, and answered questions on it too.

But she had had time to plan the next stage in her campaign.

Bitter as gall though it was, she was going to have to make some kind of peace with Rourke Martinez.

She shouldn't have allowed his overt hostility to get to her, she thought. She should have realised he could be useful and set out to charm him from the outset. She knew, without particular vanity, that she could have done it. She had been helping her shy mother to entertain important business clients for years, and they had not always been easy to deal with either. Yet she had invariably managed, and more than managed.

'Leigh could charm birds from trees,' Justin Frazier was wont to say proudly.

Well, she would just have to charm Rourke Martinez, she thought calmly. It could be done. Even while he had been slagging her off, he had been aware of her as a woman. She knew that, and at the time it had simply fuelled her resentment of him, but now, she acknowledged, she could turn it to her advantage maybe.

She would have to apologise sweetly, she thought, grinding her teeth. Tell him helplessly that jet-lag always affected her temper. She would have to flatter him, of course. No man with his brand of dynamic good looks could be without his share of sexual vanity. It might even be—amusing to let him fancy her a little. To let him think she could be—interested herself.

She had done it before, she thought with a little inward giggle. There wasn't a man alive who couldn't be conned into thinking he was irresistible.

She would have to be discreet about it, of course. The journey to Atayahuanco would be fraught enough without having to fight off unwanted advances from her guide.

With new determination, she knocked at the door of the inner office. It opened almost at once, and the girl looked at her enquiringly.

'
Si, seňorita
? You are having a long wait, I think.'

'I think so too,' Leigh said briskly. 'It might be better to leave Doctor Martinez a note, if you can give me a sheet of paper and an envelope.'

The note took a lot of thinking about. She wanted it to sound reasonably enticing, without actually grovelling to the creature.

'Dear Doctor Martinez,' she wrote at last, 'I feel we got off on the wrong foot yesterday. May I make amends by inviting you to have dinner with me at my hotel either tonight or tomorrow? I expect to be out for the rest of the day, but a message left at reception will be quite sufficient.' She added, 'Sincerely yours' and her signature, and looked at her handiwork with satisfaction. That should bring him, if only out of curiosity.

And by the time dinner was over, she would have him eating out of her hand, she thought, smiling to herself, sealing the envelope as if she were sealing his fate with it.

Leigh could not have said she thoroughly enjoyed her sightseeing that day. Armed with a guide book, she dutifully toured the Plaza de Armes, stared into the swirling waters of the Rimac from the Bridge of Stones, and recoiled, shuddering, from the mummified remains of the great
conquistador
Francisco Pizarro, preserved ghoulishly in a glass case in the Cathedral.

She wasn't sure she approved of Pizarro. Everything she had ever read about the Inca civilisation suggested it had worked perfectly well without outside interference. But the gold which they took so much for granted had lured the conquerors and plunderers from the Old World, and the Spaniards had overthrown the Inca Atahualpa by a trick, then held him to ransom. But the riches of his kingdom, which his bewildered people had brought in load after weary load, were not enough to save him. Pizarro, having sworn not one drop of his blood should be spilled, kept his word by having the Inca strangled.