The Dark Crusader. Alistair MacLean
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she was holding her enthusiasm pretty well in check. I’d noticed this in Athens, this remote and rather aloof self-sufficiency which I found vaguely irritating, but that wasn’t going to stop me from saying what I was going to say.
‘Nice to see you again, Miss Hopeman. Or it should be. But not here and not now. Don’t you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’
She looked at me with big hazel eyes wide open under her raised dark brows, then the mouth curved slowly into an amused smile as she turned away.
‘Has Mr Bentall been coming all over chivalrous and noble on my account, Colonel Raine?’ she asked sweetly.
‘Well, yes, I’m afraid he has, rather,’ the colonel admitted. ‘And please, we must have none of this Mr Bentall – Miss Hopeman talk. Among young married couples, I mean.’ He poked a pipe-cleaner through the stem of his pipe, nodded in satisfaction as it emerged from the bowl black as a chimney sweep’s brush and went on almost dreamily. ‘John and Marie Bentall. I think the names go rather well together.’
‘Do you feel that, too?’ the girl said with interest. She turned to me again and smiled brightly. ‘I do so appreciate your concern. It’s really most kind of you.’ A pause, then she added: ‘John.’
I didn’t hit her because I hold the view that that sort of thing went out with the cavemen, but I could appreciate how the old boys felt. I gave her what I hoped was a cool and enigmatic smile and turned away.
‘Clothes, sir,’ I said to Raine. ‘I’ll need to buy some. It’s high summer out there now.’
‘You’ll find two new suitcases in your flat, Bentall, packed with everything you need.’
‘Tickets?’
‘Here.’ He slid a packet across. ‘They were mailed to you four days ago by Wagons/Lits Cook. Paid by cheque. Man called Tobias Smith. No one has ever heard of him, but his bank account is healthy enough. You don’t fly east, as you might expect, but west, via New York, San Francisco, Hawaii and Fiji. I suppose the man who pays the piper calls the tune.’
‘Passports?’
‘Both in your cases in your flat.’ The little tic touched the side of his face. ‘Yours, for a change, is in your own name. Had to be. They’d check on you, university, subsequent career and so forth. We fixed it so that no inquirer would know you left Hepworth a year ago. Also in your case you’ll find a thousand dollars in American Express cheques.’
‘I hope I live to spend it,’ I said. ‘Who’s travelling with us, sir?’
There was a small silence, a brittle silence, and two pairs of eyes were on me, the narrow cold ice-green ones and the large warm hazel eyes. Marie Hopeman spoke first.
‘Perhaps you would explain –’
‘Hah!’ I interrupted. ‘Perhaps I would explain. And you’re the person – well, never mind. Sixteen people leave from here for Australia or New Zealand. Eight never arrive. Fifty per cent. Which means that there’s a fifty per cent chance that we don’t arrive. So there will be an observer in the plane so that Colonel Raine can erect a tombstone over the spot where we’re buried. Or more likely just a wreath flung in the Pacific.’
‘The possibility of a little trouble en route had occurred to me,’ the colonel said carefully. ‘There will be an observer with you – not the same one all the way, naturally. It is better that you do not know who those observers are.’ He rose to his feet and walked round the table. The briefing was over.
‘I am sincerely sorry,’ he finished. ‘I do not like any of this, but I am a blind man in a dark room and there is no other course open to me. I hope things go well.’ He offered his hand briefly to both of us, shook his head, murmured: ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye,’ and walked back to his desk.
I opened the door for Marie Hopeman and glanced back over my shoulder to see how sorry he was. But he wasn’t looking sorry, he was just looking earnestly into the bowl of his pipe so I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him sitting there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.
Fellow-passengers on the plane, the old hands on the America-Australia run, had spoken of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Viti Levu as the finest in the Western Pacific, and a very brief acquaintance with it had persuaded me that they were probably right. Old-fashioned but magnificent and shining like a newly-minted silver coin, it was run with a quiet and courteous efficiency that would have horrified the average English hotelier. The bedrooms were luxurious, the food superb – the memory of the seven-course dinner we’d had that night would linger for years – and the view from the veranda of the haze-softened mountains across the moonlit bay belonged to another world.
But there’s no perfection in a very imperfect world: the locks on the bedroom doors of the Grand Pacific Hotel were just no good at all.
My first intimation of this came when I woke up in the middle of the night in response to someone prodding my shoulder. But my first thought was not of the door-locks but of the finger prodding me. It was the hardest finger I’ve ever felt. It felt like a piece of steel. I struggled to open my eyes against weariness and the glare of the overhead light and finally managed to focus them on my left shoulder. It was a piece of steel. It was a dully-gleaming .38 Colt automatic and just in case I should have made any mistake in identification whoever was holding it shifted the gun as soon as he saw me stir so that my right eye could stare down the centre of the barrel. It was a gun all right. My gaze travelled up past the gun, the hairy brown wrist, the white-coated arm to the brown cold still face with battered yachting cap above, then back to the automatic again.
‘O.K., friend.’ I said. I meant it to sound cool and casual but it came out more like the raven – the hoarse one – croaking on the battlements of Macbeth’s castle. ‘I can see it’s a gun. Cleaned and oiled and everything. But take it away, please. Guns are dangerous things.’
‘A wise guy, eh?’ he said coldly. ‘Showing the little wife what a hero he is. But you wouldn’t really like to be a hero, would you, Bentall? You wouldn’t really like to start something?’
I would have loved to start something. I would have loved to take his gun away and beat him over the head with it. Having guns pointed at my eye gives me a nasty dry mouth, makes my heart work overtime and uses up a great deal of adrenalin. I was just starting out to think what else I would like to do to him when he nodded across the bed.
‘Because if you are, you might have a look there first.’
I turned slowly, so as not to excite anyone. Except only for the yellow of his eyes, the man on the other side of the bed was a symphony in black. Black suit, black sailor’s jersey under it, black hat and one of the blackest faces I had ever seen: a thin, taut, pinch-nosed face, the face of a pure Indian. He was very narrow and very short but he didn’t have to be big on account of what he held in his hands, a twelve-bore shotgun which had had almost two-thirds of its original length sawn off at stock and barrels. It was like looking down a couple of unlit railway tunnels. I turned away slowly and looked at the white man.
‘I see what you mean. Can I sit up?’
He nodded and stepped back a couple of feet. I swung my legs over the bed and looked across to the other side of the room where Marie Hopeman, a third man, also black, standing beside her, was sitting in a rattan chair by her bed. She was dressed in a blue and white sleeveless silk dress and because it was sleeveless I could see the four bright marks on the upper arm where someone had grabbed her, not too gently.
I was more or less dressed myself, all except coat and tie, although we had arrived there seven earlier after a long and bumpy road trip forced on lack of accommodation at the airfield at the other end of the island.