At the Edge of the Sun

by Anne Stuart

  She heard the door open behind her. It could only be Randall, and she held herself very still, willing him to come over and wake her in the best possible way.

  She waited in vain. He barely made a sound, moving around the room. And then she heard the muffled scrape of the one upholstered chair in the room, the telltale squeak of aging springs.

  Pulling the covers around her chilled shoulders, she looked at him, and didn’t like what she saw. He was fully dressed except for his jacket and tie. It was the old Randall. Distant, elusive, a faint shadow of mockery in his chilly eyes and thin, unsmiling mouth. The tumultuous passion of Christmas Eve might never have happened.

  “Ian’s back,” he said without preamble, his voice steady.

  “Nice for Holly,” Maggie observed, struggling to fight off the sense of confusion that was threatening to smother her.

  “Yes,” said Randall.

  The silence lengthened and grew. He couldn’t look at her, wouldn’t meet her gaze. He kept those shadowed eyes of his on the snowy canal scene outside the window, and Maggie bit back her frustration.

  “Does he know anything?” she asked finally.

  “Who?”

  “Ian. You said he was back.”

  “I didn’t see him. Signor Tonetti told me he spent the night in Holly’s room.”

  “Oh.”

  Randall turned from the canal and focused on a spot just above her left shoulder. “Do you want some coffee?” he inquired politely. “There’s some already made.”

  Maggie sat there and counted to ten and then suddenly it began to make sense. What had he said last night? That he was tired of her hating him in the morning. Tired or not, that was what he was expecting, what he had steeled himself for.

  Slowly Maggie rose from the bed. It was too cold to prance around naked, so she drew the slightly tatty green brocade bedspread around her shivering body and advanced on him, a stern expression on her face.

  He watched her approach with narrowed, wary eyes, clearly not sure how to react. She stopped in front of him, glaring down.

  “Randall,” she said with deceptive calm. “To quote an old song by the Shangri-las, when I say I’m in love you’d best believe I’m in love.” She dropped down into his lap, pulling the bedspread around them.

  For a moment he didn’t move, he just looked at her as if she were out of her mind. Then his long, hard hands caught her arms and pulled her against him, sliding under her breast and across her smooth, naked skin with a deft sureness that left her momentarily breathless.

  “Oh, yeah?” he murmured, and the chilly distance had melted away.

  “Yeah,” she said, biting his earlobe. “You’re mine now, Randall. You’re going to have to get used to being pawed and molested at all hours of the day and night.” She dropped her hands down to the telltale bulge beneath his thin leather belt.

  “I’ve unleashed a monster,” he said lightly, but she couldn’t miss the thread of relief in his voice.

  “You have indeed.” She kissed him full on the mouth, and his tongue met hers, jousting sweetly. When she finally pulled away she was breathless and trembling. “Come back to bed, Randall,” she whispered. “We can have coffee later. Besides, you’re going to need a big breakfast.”

  “I am?”

  She smiled demurely. “You’re going to need your strength.” And she kissed him again.

  Christmas brunch was an odd sort of affair. The four of them met in Signor Tonetti’s crowded dining room at a little before noon, with absurdly sheepish expressions on their faces and the shadows of an energetically spent night beneath their eyes.

  They were oh, so polite, Maggie thought, stifling a grin as she sipped her blessedly strong coffee. Ian and Holly kept making the most nonsensical conversation, mostly consisting of “more coffee?” “pass the sugar,” and “try the preserves.” The subject of Ian’s nonexistent army commission never came up, and Maggie assumed Holly and he must have hashed it out the night before. Among other things. The two of them sat in blissful silence, sharing the occasional embarrassed grin.

  Randall was just as bad. He must be an adherent to the rule of if you can’t say anything bad about a person, don’t say anything. He sat there, brooding into his coffee, answering in monosyllables, his hand on her knee beneath the linen tablecloth.

  “So what’s next?” Holly said brightly when she’d managed to wolf down an astonishing amount of sweet buns. “Anybody know where Flynn’s gone to?”

  “I know,” Ian rumbled, his green eyes downcast. “Not that it makes any difference because I don’t know where the hell Cul de Sac is.”

  “I do,” Randall said, all trace of abstraction leaving him. He drained his coffee, setting it down with a snap on the china saucer. Three pairs of eyes turned in his direction, but he was taking his time now, pouring himself another cup and adding an unexpected lump of sugar.

  “I thought you drank your coffee black?” Maggie questioned irrelevantly.

  “I do. Today I need the sugar.” His smile was just this side of a grin.

  “The hell with how he drinks his goddamned coffee,” Ian exploded. “Where has Flynn gone to?”

  “Ever hear of Hole in the Wall?” he countered.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “Wasn’t that the western town somewhere in the Rockies where all the outlaws hid out? Butch Cassidy, Jesse James and the gang? And the law left them completely alone.”

  “That’s what Cul de Sac is. It’s in Northern Africa, somewhere in Salambia, and it’s sort of a cross between a modern hotel and a fortress. The dregs of the earth hang out there—vacation time for terrorists.” His voice was lightly bitter.

  “Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?” Holly demanded.

  “What can we do? For one thing, we’re not sure where it is. For another, even if we did know, we can’t very well send bombers or an army into another country—it would be looked on as an act of war. Not that the Salambians have much of an army, but any act of aggression like that could trigger some heavy aid from Russia. We don’t dare.”

  “Who’s this we, white man?” Holly demanded.

  Randall shrugged. “CIA, Interpol, any of the good guys.”

  “Are you one of the good guys?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Can we find out where it is?” Ian intervened.

  Randall’s chilly eyes met his. “Maybe. We can’t very well call on your sources, can we? Considering your recent unhappy discharge from Her Majesty’s forces I’d think the British army wouldn’t be terribly helpful. And whoever’s been feeding you information has gotten us into nothing but trouble. I doubt they’d give us much help this time.”

  Ian’s face grew slightly mutinous. “Maybe that’s the best thing we can do. We … I … have been led into a trap time and time again. Maybe whoever’s been pulling the strings would want to lead us straight to the heart of the matter.”

  “Maybe.”

  Maggie looked at Randall with a question in her eyes. Ian didn’t know Maeve O’Connor was dead—no one did but the two of them; Maggie hadn’t even told Holly. She opened her mouth to say something, when the imperceptible shake of Randall’s elegant head shut it again, and she leaned back in the fragile chair.

  “You try your sources, Ian,” Randall said, “and I’ll try mine. Maybe between the two of them we’ll come up with something.”

  Ian was a perceptive man. His green eyes swept between the two of them, suspicious, wary. “I’ll find him,” he said firmly. “I have too big a score to settle with him not to.”

  And Maggie, remembering Maeve’s butchered body, shivered in the bright winter sunlight.

  seventeen

  Maggie shut her suitcase, snapping the locks with her usual efficiency, her mind on the task ahead of them. For once the four of them had worked together, pooling their information, and it had been easier than she had expected. Holly had worked the cocktail circuit, mingling with the diplomatic types that abounded in
Venice. The first ambassador she’d zeroed in on had been the most helpful, possibly because he was the most besotted with Holly’s magnificent aquamarine eyes and her perfectly formed body. From him she learned the general location of Cul de Sac (in the western plains of Salambia), the average occupancy of the compound (around one hundred guests, not counting the staff), and the defenses of the place (generally impregnable).

  They’d gone on from there to find that Salambia was a small, emerging nation tucked in between the starving desert vastness of Ethiopia and the equally drought-struck wastes of Somalia. In better times it had been a rich little country, with a leftist dictatorship that nevertheless respected American capitalism and the vast amounts of money the capitalist system could engender. But the drought had wiped out half the economy, and the thirty-seven attempts at a military coup had decimated the rest. Now it was just another starving Third World nation, flirting with Russia, toying with the U.S., struggling desperately to survive and not be absorbed into its more powerful neighbors.

  Into this mess had come Timothy Seamus Flynn and his ilk, pouring money into President Mbubu’s coffers in return for amnesty. Murderers from all over the world could hide out in what had started out as the first Holiday Inn in northeastern Africa. They could come and vacation, recuperate with the best of hospital care, and no one could touch them. No one, that is, until now.

  Maggie had done her bit, calling Mike Jackson back in Washington. Apart from a plaintive request that she eventually come back to work, her boss at Third World Causes, Ltd., took no more than twenty-four hours to come up with the goods. The current head of operations at Cul de Sac was a retired American agent who’d turned. His code name was Lazarus, and he was considered extremely dangerous. While official Washington couldn’t sanction any sort of attack, the demise of said Lazarus would be greeted with relief and perhaps even some monetary reward.

  Maggie had shrugged that one off. For the time being all they could concentrate on was finishing off Tim Flynn. There was little doubt that every inmate of Cul de Sac deserved a swift, bloody death, but Maggie didn’t feel like appointing herself judge, jury, and executioner. If Lazarus tried to stop them it would be a different matter. But their main plan was to get in, take care of Flynn, and escape without anyone being the wiser.

  Ian had gone back to the little shop in the Calle del Porco. Maddelena, fresh from Christmas mass, had been stubborn and uncommunicative until Ian had suggested she might be forced to accompany them to Cul de Sac. Rather than have her incompetency revealed, she had provided the most important link in the puzzle—the current password that would get the four of them into the fortress.

  Not that the four of them should go. They all knew it was stupid, but not one of them was willing to stay behind. With Maddelena an incommunicado guest of the state of Venice, there was no one to warn Lazarus and his guests that they were coming. All they needed was transportation and visas.

  Randall took care of that. Maggie didn’t even want to ask how. He had connections with everyone, and whether it was the CIA, Interpol, or something more nefarious she didn’t need to know. When he arrived back at the Palazzo Carboni with four forged passports and the information that a hired plane would be ready at noon the next day, the others had merely nodded. It was finally going down.

  Maggie didn’t want to leave Venice, the decaying elegance of the Palazzo Carboni, the dark room with its sagging bed and cold floors. She didn’t want to leave the first place she’d been happy in years.

  She and Randall had spent hours talking, wrapped up in the threadbare linen sheets and heavy blankets, wrapped in each other’s arms. She talked to him about growing up in Hollywood, about chasing after her feckless mother and trying to raise her younger sisters. And she finally talked, in soul-wrenching details, of Deke Robinson’s raping her when she was barely sixteen years old—a rape that had left her terrified of the dark and afraid of men. Until Randall and Gemansk, six years ago.

  And he’d talked about growing up in Cambridge with his robber baron grandfather. His mother’s overwhelming philanthropic works left little time for her own family, and his father had his university dream world, where Shakespeare somehow seemed more real than his children. And Randall had grown up thinking love was taking care of the distant masses, mankind, and all its woes, that love was a Shakespeare sonnet, constant, seeking not to alter but to worship, unquestioningly. Love wasn’t need and want and anger and passion—such emotions weren’t reserved for the Carters of Cambridge.

  He told her how long he loved her, long before he even knew it, long before he even recognized that love existed. They made love over and over and over again, and yet still he held something back.

  She knew it without asking, knew by the shadow that still lingered in his blue-gray eyes, the tightness that thinned his mouth when he thought she wasn’t looking. She knew, and she felt the clutching tendrils of fear weaving around her heart. She knew, and was too frightened to ask what it was. She just clung to him all the more tightly, dreading the future.

  She yanked her suitcase off the bed, looking around the room one last time. She’d spent her first honeymoon in this room, lying in Mack’s arms. She’d spent her second honeymoon, this time without benefit of marriage, in the same bed, becoming so tied up with Randall, physically, emotionally, spiritually, that there was no way she was ever going to be free. She looked around her and knew, no matter what happened, that she would never come back here again. A part of her life was over, a part full of doubts, regret, and passion. Stepping out into the hall, she shut the door behind her without a backward glance.

  When it came to arranging transportation, Randall was an expert. The small, sleek Learjet waiting at the private airport just outside of Mestre was new and shiny, and if the pilot looked more like a member of the Red Brigade and less like Peter Graves, Maggie’s perfect idea of a pilot, well, who was she to complain? She had little doubt he really was a terrorist, given Randall’s usual efficiency.

  “You want to tell us your plan of action?” Ian demanded not long after they took off into the southern skies. “I presume you do have a plan?”

  “Did you check out your passport?” Randall was stretched out in one of the elegant reclining seats, his expression shuttered, giving nothing away.

  “It says I’m James Welcome, age thirty-three, from New Zealand.”

  “And that’s who you are,” Randall said. “James Welcome died in an airport bombing in Brussels last fall. The suitcase he was carrying exploded before he could leave it with the innocent passengers. Interpol kept his death a secret, just in case someone might be able to use his identity. He happened to have the same general physical description as you have. Do you think you can manage a New Zealand accent?”

  “Australian is as close as I can come.”

  “It’ll do. Holly’s your girl friend. She’s a violence groupie—likes excitement. All she has to do is giggle a lot.”

  “Great.” Holly groaned. “How about letting me be the terrorist and Ian be the groupie?”

  “Ian’s used to working undercover,” Randall replied. “Besides, we couldn’t come up with a match for you. There aren’t that many staggeringly tall and beautiful terrorists roaming around.”

  “Sexist pig,” Holly said genially. “What about you and Maggie?”

  Maggie looked up from her seat beside the window. “You think a groupie is boring? I get to be a nurse, for God’s sake. I’m just lucky he didn’t decide to make me a secretary.”

  “A nurse?” Ian echoed.

  “And I’m a plastic surgeon. Cul de Sac has the best equipped hospital in the entire continent of Africa. They do the most advanced cosmetic surgery there, for obvious reasons. Maggie and I are simply taking over from an American doctor and his mistress.”

  “And where are they?”

  “They’ve been … er … persuaded to remain in the States while we make use of their identities. So we all have an entree, and if we just watch what we’re doing, we�
�ll be fine. We’re landing on the private airstrip in a couple of hours, and then we’ll be on our own. Between the four of us we should be able to find Flynn.”

  “What if he finds us first?” Holly demanded. “He knows what we all look like.”

  “We’ll just have to find him before he finds us,” Randall said.

  “And before we’re scheduled for surgery,” Maggie added.

  “Oh, no,” Holly murmured, shuddering.

  “Don’t worry.” An uncharacteristic smile lit Randall’s dark face. “I can look efficient in an operating room. I used to watch M*A*S*H all the time.”

  It was the last semijesting remark anyone made. The tension inside the pressurized cabin was so thick, Maggie thought she might choke on it. The galley was stocked with ice, Dom Perignon, and every kind of liquor imaginable, but none of them dared take anything. They just sat there, drinking coffee and diet cola, watching the thick, puffy clouds as they drew nearer and nearer to Armageddon.

  Maggie stretched her long legs out in front of her, willing her muscles to relax. Ian and Holly weren’t talking, but at least they were sitting together, and beneath their silent tension there was clearly a bond. He still didn’t know that Flynn had murdered his cousin Maeve—Randall insisted it would only distract him. Sooner or later they’d tell him; for now ignorance was their best bet. Every now and then Holly would put out one slim hand, touching Ian’s arm and he’d smile at her distractedly, sweetly, and Maggie was jealous …

  There were no sweet smiles for her. No closeness, no touching, no silent bond. Randall had withdrawn into himself, leaving her miles away, and he sat by the opposite window, alone, staring out into the limitless sky, grimness haunting his mouth and eyes.

  He’d chosen a seat off by himself, but that didn’t stop Maggie. She rose, making her way steadily across the cabin, and sank to the carpeted floor beside him. He looked up then, but his expression was unreadable.

  “What do you think our chances are?” she said softly, pitching her voice low so the others couldn’t hear her.