Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (176 page)

No matter that it could be applied to any of her current heroes or heroines the Prince of Wales, or the singer of popular songs with an outrageous name that Peter could never remember, to Virginia Wade, the former Wimbledon champion, or to the Fifth Form science teacher at
Roedean who had aroused Melissa-Jane's interest in medicine, Peter knew that he should feel proper gratitude for being included in this exalted company.

"I will try to live up to your opinion of me." He stooped and kissed her, surprised at the strength of his love for this child-woman.

"And now it's too cold to stand here any longer, and Pat will never forgive us if we are late for lunch." They clattered over the stone cobbles of the stable yard, riding knee to knee, and before he dismounted, Peter indulged himself in the pleasure of his favourite view of the house that had always been home, even though it belonged now, together with the title, to Steven, the older brother, older by three hours only, but older none the less.

The house was red brick with a roof that ran at fifty different unlikely angles. It missed being hideous by a subtle margin and achieved a fairytale enchantment. Peter could never grudge it to
Steven, who loved the sprawling edifice with something close to passion.

Perhaps the desire to own the house and to restore it to its former magnificence was the goad which had pricked Steven to the superhuman effort that a British resident must make against taxation and socialist restrictions in order to amass anything like a fortune.

Steven had made that effort and now Abbots Yew stood immaculate and well-beloved in glorious gardens, and Sir Steven kept baronial style.

His affairs were so complicated, spread over so many continents that even the British taxman must have been daunted. Peter had once skirted this subject with his twin brother, and Steven had replied quietly.

"When a law is patently unjust, such as our tax law is, it's the duty of an honest man to subvert it." Peter's old-fashioned sense of rightness had baulked at such logic, but he let it pass.

It was strange that it had worked this way for the two brothers,
for Peter had always been the brilliant one, and the family had always referred to "Poor Steven'. Nobody was very surprised when Steven left
Sandhurst amid dark whispers halfway through his final year but two years later Steven was already a millionaire while Peter was a lowly second lieutenant in the British Army. Peter grinned without rancour at the memory. He had always been particularly fond of his elder brother but at that moment his train of thought was interrupted as his eye caught the mirror-like finish of the silver limousine parked at the end of the stable yard. It was one of those long Mercedes-Benz favoured by pop stars, Arab oil men, or heads of staTe, The chauffeur was uniformed in sober navy blue and was busy burnishing the paintwork to an even higher gloss. Even Steven did not run to that sort of transportation, and Peter felt mildly intrigued. House guests at Abbots Yew were always interesting. Steven Stride did not concern himself with those who did not wield either power, wealth or extraordinary talent. Beyond the Mercedes 600 was parked another smaller model; this one was black and the two men in it had the hard closed faces that marked them as bodyguards.

Melissa-Jane rolled her eyes at the automobile. "Another bloated plutocrat, I expect," she muttered. It was the currently favoured term of extreme disapproval, a great advance on "grotty" which had preceded it, Peter could not help thinking as he helped his daughter unsaddle and then rub down the horses. They went up through the rose garden,
arm in arm, and then laughing together into the main drawing-room.

"Peter old boy!" Steven came to meet him, as tall as his brother,
and once he had been as lean, but good living had thickened his body while at the same time the strains of being a professional deal maker had greyed his hair at the temples and laced his mustache with silver bristles. His face was not quite a mirror image of Peter's, slightly more fleshy and florid but the twin resemblance was still strongly marked, and now his face was alive with pleasure.

"Thought you'd broken your bloody neck, what?" Steven carefully cultivated the bluff manner of the country squire to shield his quick and shrewd intelligence.

Now he turned to Melissa-Jane and hugged her with barely a touch of incestuous pleasure. "How did Florence Nightingale go?"

"She's a darling, Uncle Steven. I will never be able to thank you."

"Peter, I
would like you to meet a very charming lady-" She had been talking to
Patricia Stride, Steven's wife, and now as she turned, the winter sunshine through the bay windows behind lit her with a soft romantic aura.

Peter felt as though the earth had tilted under his feet, and a fist closed around his ribs constricting his breathing and inhibiting the action of his heart.

He recognized her immediately from the photographs in the official file during the long-drawn-out kidnapping and subsequent murder of her husband. At one stage it had seemed that the kidnappers had crossed the Channel with their victim, and Thor had gone to condition Alpha for almost a week. Peter had studied the photographs that had been assembled from a dozen sources, but even the glossy coloured portraits from Vogue and Jours de France had not been able to capture the magnificence of the woman.

Surprisingly, he saw his own immediate recognition reflected.

There was no change in her expression, but it flared briefly like dark-green emerald fire in her eyes. There was no question in Peter's mind but that she had recognized him, and as he stepped "towards her he realized she was tall, but the fine proportion of her body had not made that immediately apparent. Her skirt was of a fine wool crepe which moulded the long, stately legs of a dancer.

"Baroness, may I present my brother. General Stride."

"How do you do General." Her English was almost perfect, a low husky voice, the slight accent very attractive, but she pronounced his rank as three distinct syllables.

"Peter, this is Baroness Altmann." Her thick glossy black hair was scraped back severely from the forehead with a perfect arrowhead of widow's peak at the centre, emphasizing the high Slavic cheekbones and the unblemished perfection of her skin but her jawline was too square and strong for beauty, and the mouth had an arrogant determined line to it. Magnificent, but not beautiful and Peter found himself violently attracted. The breathless wholesale feeling he had not experienced for twenty years.

She seemed to epitomize everything he admired in a woman.

Her body was in the condition of a trained athlete.

Beneath the oyster silk of her blouse her arms were delicately sculpted from toned muscle, the waist narrow, the breasts very small and unfettered, their lovely shape pressing clearly through fine material, her clean lightly tanned skin glowed with health and careful grooming. All this contributed to his attraction.

However, the greater part was in Peter's own mind. He knew she was a woman of extraordinary strength and achievement, that was pure aphrodisiac for him, and she exuded also the challenging air of being un-attainable. The regal eyes mocked his evident masculinity with the untouchable aloofness of a queen or a goddess. She seemed to be smiling inwardly, a cool patronizing smile at his admiration,
which she realized was no more than her due.

Quickly Peter reviewed what he knew of her.

She had begun her association with the Baron as his private secretary, and in five years had become indispensable to him. The
Baron had recognized her ability by rapidly elevating her to the boards of directors, first of some of the group's lesser subsidiaries, and finally to that of the central holding company. When the Baron's physical strength had begun to decline in his losing battle with an inexorable cancer, he came to rely more upon her, trust well placed as it soon turned out. For she ran the complex empire of heavy industrial companies, of electronics and armaments corporations, of banking and shipping and property developments, like the son he never had. When he married her he was fifty-eight years of age, almost thirty years her senior, and she had been a perfect wife as she had been a perfect business partner.

She had assembled and personally delivered the massive ransom demanded by his abductors, against the advice of the French police,
going alone and unguarded to a meeting with killers, and when they had returned the Baron's fearfully mutilated corpse to her,
she had mourned him and buried him and continued to run the empire she had inherited, with vision and strength so far beyond her years.

She was twenty-nine years old. No, that had been two years ago,
Peter realized, as he bowed over her hand, not quite touching the smooth cool fingers with his lips. She would be thirty-one years old now. She wore a single ring on her wedding finger, a solitaire diamond, not a particularly large diamond, not more than six carats but of such a perfect whiteness and fire that it seemed to be endowed with its own life. It was the choice of a woman of immense wealth and even greater style.

As Peter straightened, he realized that she was appraising him as carefully as he was her. It seemed that he would be unable to conceal anything from those slanted emerald eyes, but he returned her gaze steadily, knowing without conceit that he could withstand any such scrutiny; still intrigued, however, with the certainty that she had known him.

"Your name has been much in the news recently she said, as if in explanation.

There were sixteen for lunch, including Steven and Pat's three children and Melissa-Jane. It was a happy, relaxed meal, but the
Baroness was seated at a distance that made it impossible for Peter to speak directly to her, and though he strained to follow her conversation, her voice was low and addressed mostly to Steven and the editor of one of the national daily newspapers who flanked her. Peter found himself fully occupied in fending off the breathless attention of the pretty but feather brained blonde on his left. She was a starlet who had married well and divorced even better.

She had been handpicked by Pat Stride. Peter's sister-inlaw was indefatigable in her efforts to find him a suitable replacement for
Cynthia. Twelve years of straight failures had not daunted her in the least.

There was still time for Peter to notice that though the Baroness sipped once or twice at her wine, the level in the glass never fell,
and she picked only lightly at her plate.

Though Peter watched her covertly, the Baroness never glanced once in his direction. It was only as they went through for coffee that she came directly and unaffectedly to his side.

"Steven tells me there are Roman ruins on the estate, she said.

"I could show them to you. It is a lovely walk up through the woods."

"Thank you. I do have some business to discuss with Steven before that; shall we meet at three o'clock?" She had changed into a loose tweed skirt and jacket that would have looked bulky on a shorter or plumper woman, and high boots in the same lavender tinted brown.

Under it she wore a cashmere roll-neck jersey, and a scarf of the same fine wool hung down her back. A wide-brimmed hat with a bright feather in the band was pulled down over her eyes.

She walked in silence, hands thrust deeply into the big pockets of her jacket, making no effort to protect the expensive boots from mud,
thorns or damp bracken. She moved with a flowing, long-legged grace,
swinging from the hips so that her shoulder and head seemed to float beside Peter, at a not much lower level than his own. Had she not been a world leader in finance and industry, she might have made a great model, he decided. She had a talent for making clothes look important and elegant, while treating them with indifference.

Peter respected her silence, pleased to be able to step out to match her pace, as they went up through the dark dripping woods that smelt of leaf mould and cold rain, the oaks bare and moss-pelted,
seeming to beseech a purple grey sky with arthritic limbs held high.

They came out on the higher open ground without having stopped once, although the path had been steep and the ground soft underfoot.

She was breathing deeply but evenly, and she had coloured just sufficiently to flatter the high Slavic cheeks.

She must be in peak physical condition, he thought.

"Here they are." Peter indicated the barely discernible grass-covered ditch that circled the hilltop. "They are not very impressive, but I didn't want to warn you in advance She smiled now.

"I have been here before," she said in that intriguing husky accent.

"Well, we are off to a flying start. We have both deceived each other at our first meeting-" Peter chuckled.

"I came all the way from Paris, she explained. "It was most inconvenient really the business I had to discuss with Sir Steven could have been completed by telephone in five minutes. What I had to discuss with you could only be done face by face-" She corrected herself immediately.

"I am sorry, face to face" It was a rare slip. Steven had been strangely insistent that Peter spend this particular weekend at Abbots
Yew, and was certainly party to this encounter.

"I am flattered by the interest of such a beautiful lady-"

Instantly she frowned, and with a gesture of irritation cut short the compliment as frivolous.

"Very recently you were approached by the Narmco section of
Seddler StLel with an offer to head their Sales Division," she said,
and Peter nodded. Since his resignation had been accepted by the War
Office, there had been many offers. "The terms of employment offered were extraordinarily generous."

"That is true."

"You prefer the cloistered academic life, perhaps?" she asked, and though Peter's expression did not change, he was taken off balance. It seemed impossible that she could know of the offer of the Chair of Modern
Military History that he had been offered by a leading American university, an offer with which he was still toying idly.