Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (202 page)

"Peter," she repeated, and kissed him lightly upon the lips, a brush like a moth's wing, and her perfume touched him as softly, the fragrance of Quadrille flowering with the warmth and magic of her body.

He felt his senses tilt. With all he knew of her, yet he was still not hardened to her physical presence.

She was cool and groomed and poised as she had ever been, there was no trace at all of the confusion and fearsome loneliness that he had heard in those muffled choked-down sobs from halfway across the world not until she stepped back to tilt her head on one side,
surveying him swiftly, smiling lightly.

"Oh, cheri, you are looking so much better. I was so worried about you when last I saw you." Only then he thought he was able to detect the shadows deep in her eyes, and the tightness at the corners of her mouth.

"And you are more beautiful than I remembered." It was true, so he could say it without reserve, and she laughed, a single soft purr of pleasure.

"You never said that before," she reminded him, but still her manner was brittle. Her show of affection and friendliness might have convinced him at another time, but not now. "And I am grateful." Now she took his arm, her fingers in the crook of his elbow, and she led him to the waiting group of guests as though she did not trust herself to be alone with him another moment lest she reveal some forbidden part of herself.

There were three men and their wives: an American Democrat senator of considerable political influence, a man with a magnificent head of silver hair, eyes like dead oysters, and a beautiful wife at least thirty years his junior who looked at Peter the way a lion looks at a gazelle and held his hand seconds longer than was necessary.

There was an Australian, heavy in the shoulder and big in the gut.

His skin was tanned leathery and his eyes were framed in a network of wrinkles. They seemed to be staring through dust and sun glare at distant horizons. He owned a quarter of the world's known uranium reserves, and cattle stations whose area was twice the size of the
British Isles.

His wife was as tanned and her handshake was as firm as his.

The third man was a Spaniard whose family name was synonymous with sherry, an urbane and courtly Don, but with that fierce Moorish rake to his thin features. Peter had read somewhere that the sherry and cognac ageing in this man's cellars was valued at over five hundred million dollars, and that formed only a small part of his family's investments.

His wife was a darkly brooding Spanish beauty with an extraordinary streak of chalk white through the peak of her otherwise black hair.

As soon as the group had assimilated Peter, the talk turned back easily to the day's sport. The Australian had boated a huge black marlin that morning, a fish over one thousand pounds in weight and fifteen feet from the point of its bill to the tip of its deep sickle tail, and the company was elated.

Peter took little part in the conversation, but watched Magda
Altmann covertly. Yet she was fully aware of his scrutiny; he could see it in the way she held her hand, and the tension in her whole long slim body, but she laughed easily with the others and glanced at Peter only once or twice, each time with a smile, but the shadows were in the green depths of her eyes.

Finally she clapped her hands. "Come, everybody, we are going to open the feast." She linked arms with the senator and the Australian and led them down onto the beach.

Peter was left to cope with the senator's wife, and pushed her bosom against his upper arm and ran her tongue lightly over her lips as she clung to him.

Two of the Polynesian servants were waiting beside a long mound of white beach sand, and at Magda's signal they attacked it with shovels,
swiftly exposing a thick layer of seaweed and banana leaves from which poured columns of thick and fragrant steam. Below that was a rack of banyan wood and palm fronds which suspended the feast over another layer of seaweed and live coals.

There were exclamations of delight as the aroma of chicken and fish and pork mingled with those of breadfruit and plantains and spices.

"Ah, a success," Magda declared gaily. "If any air is allowed to enter the bake we lose it all. It burns, poof! And we are left with only charcoal." While they feasted and drank the talk and laughter became louder and less restrained, but Peter made the single drink last the evening and waited quietly not joining the conversation and ignoring the blandishments of the senator's wife.

He was waiting for some indication of when and from what direction it would come. Not here, he knew, not in this company. When it came it would be swift and efficient as everything else that Caliph did.

And suddenly he wondered at his own conceit, that had allowed him to walk, entirely unarmed and unsupported, into the arena selected and prepared by his enemy. He knew his best defence was to strike first,
perhaps this very night if the opportunity offered. The sooner the safer, he realized, and Magda smiled at him across the table set under the palm trees and laden with enough food to feed fifty. When he smiled back at her, she beckoned with a slight inclination of her head,
and then while the men argued and bantered loudly, she murmured an apology to the women and slipped unobtrusively into the shadows.

Peter gave her a count of fifty before he followed her.

She was waiting along the beach. He saw the flash of her bare smooth back in the moonlight and he went forward to where she stood staring out across the wind-ruffled waters of the lagoon

He came up behind her, and she did not turn her head but her voice was a whisper.

"I am so glad you came, Peter."

"I am so glad you asked me to." He touched the back of her neck, just behind her ear.

The ear had an almost elfin point to it that he had not noticed before and the un swept hair at her nape was silken under his fingertips. He could just locate the axis, that delicate bone at the base of the skull which the hangman aims to crush with the drop. He could do it with the pressure of thumb and it would be as quick as the knot.

am so sorry about the others," she said. "But I am getting rid of them with almost indecent haste, I'm afraid." She reached up over her shoulder and took his hand from her neck, and he did not resist.

Gently she spread the hand, and then pressed the open palm to her cheek. "They will leave early tomorrow. Pierre is flying them back to
Papeete, and then we will have Les Neuf Poissons to ourselves just you and I-" And then that husky little chuckle." And thirty-odd servants." He could understand exactly why it would be that way.

The only witnesses would be the faithful retainers of the Grande
Dame of the islands.

"Now we MUSt. go back. Unfortunately my guests are very important,
and I cannot ignore them longer but tomorrow will come. Too slowly for me, Peter but it will come." She turned in the circle of his arms and kissed him with a sudden startling ferocity, so his lips were crushed against his teeth, and then she broke from him and whispered close to his ear.

"Whatever way it goes, Peter, we have had something of value, you and I. Perhaps the most precious thing I have had in my life. They can never take that away from me." And then she was out of his arms with that uncanny speed and grace of movement and gliding back along the path towards the lights. He followed her slowly, confused and uncertain as to what she had meant by those last words, concluding finally that the purpose had been exactly that to confuse and unbalance him, and at that moment he sensed rather than heard movement behind him, and instantly whirled and ducked.

The man was ten paces behind him, had come like a leopard,
silently from the cover of a fall of lianas and flowering creepers beside the path; only some Minimal instinct had warned Peter and his body flowed into the fighting stance, balanced, strung like a nocked arrow, at once ready both to attack and meet attack.

"Good evening, General Stride." Peter only just managed to arrest himself, and he straightened slowly but with each hand still extended stiffly at his side like the blade of a meat cleaver, and as lethal.

"Carl! he said. So the grey wolves had been close, within feet of them, guarding their mistress even in that intimate moment.

"I hope I did not alarm you," said the bodyguard and though
Peter could not see the man's expression, there was a faint mockery in his voice, If there was confirmation needed, complete and final, this was it. Only Caliph would have need of a guard on a romantic assignment. Peter knew then beyond any doubt that either he or Magda
Altmann would be dead by sunset the following evening
before going into the bungalow he made a stealthy -prowling circuit of the bushes and shrubs that surrounded it. He found nothing suspicious but in the interior the bed had been prepared and his shaving gear cleaned and neatly rearranged. His soiled clothing had been taken for cleaning and the other clothing had been pressed and rearranged more neatly than his own unpacking. He could not therefore be certain that his other possessions had not been searched, but it was safe to presume they had.

Caliph would not neglect such an elementary precaution. " The locks on doors and windows were inadequate, had probably not been used in years, for there had been no serpents in this paradise, not until recently. So he placed chairs and other obstacles in such a way that an intruder should stumble over them in the dark, and then he rumpled the bed and arranged the pillows to look like a sleeping figure, but took a single blanket to the long couch in the private lounge. He did not really expect an attempt before the other guests left the island,
but if it came he would confuse Caliph's scenario as much as possible.

He slept fitfully, jerking awake when a falling palm frond rattled across the roof, or the moon threw picture shadows on the wall across the room. just before dawn he fell into a deeper sleep and his dreams were distorted and nonsensical, only the sharp clear image of
Melissa-Jane's terror-stricken face and her silent screams of horror remained with him when he woke. The memory roused in him the cold lust for vengeance which had abated a little in the weeks since her rescue and he felt reaffirmed, possessed of a steely purpose once more,
determined to resist the softening, fatal allure of Caliph.

He rose in the slippery pearl light of not yet dawn, and went down to the beach. He swam out a mile beyond the reef, and had a long pull back against a rogue current, but he came ashore feeling good and hard and alert as he had not been in weeks.

All right, he thought grimly. Let it come. I'm as ready as I'll ever be.

There was a farewell breakfast for the departing guests, on the sugary sands of the beach that had been swept smooth by the night tide pink Laurent Perrier champagne and hothouse strawberries flown in from Auckland, New Zealand.

Magda Altmann wore brief green pants that showed off her long shapely legs to perfection, and a matching "boob tube" across her small neat breasts but her belly and shoulders and back were bare. It was the body of a finely trained athlete, but drawn by a great artist.

She seemed unnaturally elated to Peter, her gaiety was slightly forced and the low purring laughter just a little too ready and with a saw-edge to it. It was almost as though she had made some hard decision, and was steeling herself to carry it through. Peter thought of them as true opponents who had trained carefully for the coming configuration like prize fighters at the weigh-in.

After the breakfast they rode up in a cavalcade of electric carts to the airfield. The senator, revved-up with pink champagne and sweating lightly in the rising heat, gave Magda an over-affectionate farewell, but she skilfully avoided his hands and shunted him expertly into the Tri Islander after the other passengers.

Pierre, Magda's pilot, stood on the brakes at the end of the runway while he ran all three engines up to full power.

Then he let her go, and the moment she had speed he rotated her into a nose-high obstacle-clearance attitude.

The Ungainly machine itimped into the sky and went over the palms at the end of the short strip with five hundred feet to spare and
Magda turned to Peter ecstatically.

"I hardly slept last night, "she admitted, as she kissed him.

"Neither did I," Peter told her and then he added silently" for the same reasons, I'm sure."

"I've planned a special day for us,"
she went on. "And I don't want to waste another minute of it." The head boatman had Magda's big forty-five-foot Chriscraft Fisherman singled up at the end of the jetty. It was a beautiful boat, with long low attacking lines that made it seem to be flying even when on its mooring lines, and loving care had very obviously been lavished upon it. The paintwork was unmarked and the stainless steel fittings were polished to a mirror finish. The boatman beamed happily when Magda commended him with a smile and a word.

"Tanks are full, Baronne. The scuba bottles are charged and the light rods are rigged. The water-skis are in the main racks, and the chef came down himself to check the icebox." However, his wide white smile faded when he learned that Magda was taking the boat out alone.

"Don't you trust me? "she laughed.

"Oh, of course, Baronne-" But he could not hide his chagrin at having to give over his charge even to such a distinguished captain.

He handled the lines himself, casting her off, and calling anxious last-minute advice to Magda as the gap between jetty and vessel opened.

"Ne t'kquiet pas!" she laughed at him, but he made a dejected figure standing on the end of the jetty as Magda slowly opened up both diesels and the Chris-craft came up on the plane and seemed almost to break free of the surface.

Her wake was scored deep and clean and straight through the gin-clear water of the lagoon, a tribute to the design of her hull, and then it curved out gracefully behind them as Magda made the turn between the channel markers and lined her up for the passage through the reef, and out into the open Pacific.