Whirlpool

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Hudson’s eyebrows rose like elegant silver wings. Whoever Toth was, she was highly valued by the New York Times. But as far as Hudson was concerned, journalists came in two varieties, fawners and muckrakers. He used the first and avoided the second.

  Unfortunately, no one could be absolutely certain which journalists were which until after the piece came out.

  “What does she look like?” Hudson asked.

  “Half white, half Asian, half black, and two hundred percent high-test snatch.”

  Hudson looked up sharply. The expression on Cahill’s face was sexual and predatory.

  “Before you go off half cocked,” Hudson said coolly, “show Ms. Toth in.”

  Less than a minute after Cahill left, someone knocked firmly on the cabin door.

  “Come in,” Hudson said clearly.

  The door opened.

  Hudson’s first impression was that in a lifetime devoted to fornication, he had seen few women as beautifully built as Claire Toth. Never had he seen one who carried herself with such complete sexual assurance. He half expected the carpet to ignite beneath her elegantly arched feet.

  Belatedly Hudson realized that Claire Toth was nearly six feet tall, lithe, and strong. She easily handled a heavy leather Coach bag that was big enough to conceal a minicam, an Uzi, or both at once. Proud, full breasts swelled beneath a dark silk shirt that was unbuttoned just enough to show cleavage above a small triangle of cream lace camisole. Taut, lushly curving buttocks were enhanced by a skirt that ended well above the knees. The broad leather belt she wore emphasized the classic hourglass of her figure.

  Hudson discovered with a mixture of gratification and dismay that he was fully aroused. The woman wore her sexuality like a dark, primal perfume.

  “Well, well,” he murmured.

  The opening salvo had been fired in a sexual war. He didn’t want to be caught off guard again.

  And, damn, but he felt like a man.

  He came to his feet. It wasn’t meant as a polite gesture. It was a way to show her what she was up against.

  Ignoring him, Claire Toth glanced around at the unique furnishings of the cabin. Her eye fell on a Chinese painting that looked as though it had once graced the wall of an imperial pleasure house. With a faint smile she compared it to her own experience.

  “It’s better when you aren’t completely tied up,” she said.

  Her voice was smoky, husky, ruffling primeval nerve endings.

  “Most things are,” Hudson agreed. “Sit down, Ms. Toth. Forgive me if it takes a moment for me to organize my thoughts. My staff failed to warn me.”

  “That I was black?”

  Slowly Hudson shook his head. Quite openly he studied Toth like an objet d’art he was considering acquiring for his museum.

  “You’re black,” he said. “You’re Asian. You’re Caucasian. You’re what Eve must have been. You’re one of the most stunningly sexual females I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m flattered.” Toth’s smile was as cold as the silver buckle on her belt. “The two waiting for you in the commoners’ cabin are dynamite, tits and ass to make a showgirl sweat with envy.”

  As Toth spoke, she let her clear black glance travel down Hudson’s body until she was looking at his crotch. Her research on Hudson had told her that he was a virile, sexually aggressive man.

  What it hadn’t told her was that he could—or would—get hard just watching her walk toward him.

  “We could delay the interview for a time,” she said, “while the whores take care of your little problem. Actually, it’s not so little, is it?”

  The approval in Toth’s smile made it difficult for Hudson to keep his mind on anything but his crotch.

  “Whores?” he asked. “Do you mean the temporary members of my secretarial staff?”

  “They’re working girls, all right.” She laughed low in her throat. “Your constant need of sex is understood by all who know you and a lot who don’t. The clinical term for it is satyriasis.”

  “A term coined by jealous men.”

  “Yeah. I’ve often thought so. Must have been tough to get enough ass before you were rich, though.”

  “The world is full of willing women,” he countered, “but most of them aren’t attractive enough to fuck face-to-face.”

  Toth flashed him a smile that was part streetwalker and part coquette. “Maybe they’re more attractive when they’re less willing?”

  “We’ll probably find out, won’t we?” Hudson said, smiling. “Would you care for a drink?”

  “Some champagne would be nice, if you have it.”

  “Certainly.”

  He went to a sideboard and opened a small door, revealing a well-stocked refrigerator. He passed over a bottle of La Grande Dame—too expensive for the moment—selected a bottle of Moët, opened it expertly, and poured two glasses. He presented one to Toth and offered his own in a small toast.

  She glanced at his glass and arched a single, perfectly shaped eyebrow. “I’m honored. I was told you seldom drink alcohol. Something about your age or your metabolism or your dick.”

  Hudson felt the flick of her claws and almost smiled at the pleasure-pain it brought. With every word she revealed herself more clearly to him.

  “You’re very well informed,” he said.

  “You have no idea how well informed I am.”

  Something in her smile sent a twinge down his spine that had nothing to do with sex.

  “I have an extremely complete file on you,” Toth added.

  Then she clinked her glass lightly against Hudson’s, curled her wrist around his, and drank from his glass. Looking him right in the eye, she rubbed her abdomen slowly against his erection.

  “Do you?” he asked, rubbing back where it would do the most good.

  “Oh, yes,” she said huskily. “And unless you give me a spectacular reason not to, I’ll publish every tawdry word of it.”

  9

  Cambria

  Monday afternoon

  Swann looked at his daughter.

  She wasn’t looking at him.

  Silently he cursed the circumstance that had brought him back into Laurel’s life. He didn’t know how much more of the truth she could take. But he knew there was a lot more she had to take.

  It was a matter of survival.

  His.

  Hers.

  Finally he sighed and continued talking. “At the underground level where I worked,” he said, passing over things he couldn’t tell her, “intelligence operators aren’t nice clean folks with pressed trousers and computer printouts from Langley. The guys I worked with were smugglers or black marketeers or out-and-out thugs, the kind of men who bought and sold everything from missiles to little girls at two cents on the dollar.”

  Laurel wanted to look away from her father. She couldn’t. She could only face the answers she’d stupidly asked for all her life.

  Swann winced inwardly at the change in his daughter’s eyes, but he kept on talking, fast and hard, telling her things she didn’t want to hear.

  But she had to hear him or he would be up to his lips in shit the first time someone asked her about a flashy red egg, and had she seen her daddy lately?

  “Not pretty, but that’s the way it is in the trenches,” he said. “The agency has to hire thugs because thugs are the last realists in the world. They’re the ones who know how to work the system, any system, anywhere on earth.”

  As he talked he began pacing, his hands stuffed into the hip pockets of his jeans. He paused beside the workbench and stared out at the ocean.

  “There’s nothing new in the shadow alliance between the crooks and the good guys,” Swann said. “It’s been going on since the Second World War, when the OSS hired the Union Corse in France and the Mafia in Italy. When I started, I was running a network of Fukien Chinese gamblers and cutthroats who lived in Kowloon and did the government’s dirty work in Saigon.”

  When her father leaned toward the window, Laurel saw the butt of a
pistol outlined underneath his loose cotton shirt. The gun was stuffed behind his waistband, nestled in the small of his back. She stared at the outline of the weapon. Somehow it looked natural on him, like a wallet would in another man’s pocket.

  It was the first time Swann had worn a gun in her presence. She wondered why he thought he needed one now.

  None of the explanations she thought of comforted her.

  “Nothing much has changed in the business,” he said in a clipped voice, watching the ocean. “The last job I had involved ethnic Basque businessmen in a little town called Medellín, Colombia. The Basques are as brutal as anyone I’ve ever worked with. Sort of the Colombian equivalent of La Cosa Nostra. In spades. Real assholes, but they sure knew how to smuggle guns to the folks we wanted to see in power in the interior of South America.”

  He glanced at his daughter and read her emotions in her dilated pupils, pale skin, and compressed mouth.

  “Jesus, kid,” he said, “I wasn’t a criminal, not in my own mind and not in Uncle Sam’s. But I wasn’t a Boy Scout either. Ask any undercover cop what it’s like. If you’re sitting around arguing about perfect morality, somebody who doesn’t know moral from moron sticks a knife between your ribs.”

  Turning, Swann began to walk again, measuring the perimeter of the room like a captive wolf pacing out the limits of his prison.

  “I did things that would make your blood run cold,” he said bluntly. “That’s why I’ve never talked to you like this before. But I’ve never done anything bad to anybody who wouldn’t have done it to me first, and worse, if I’d given them the chance.”

  He paused by the window again, drawn by something in the afternoon ocean that only he could see.

  “If I made a mistake,” he said bitterly, “it was in not realizing until the end of the game that I was just a tool, an asset like any other hired help. Expendable. I wasn’t one of them, an intelligence officer, a spy with a four-in-hand tie and a college degree. I was a contract agent—cheap, anonymous protection used for a single mission and then thrown away. Like a condom.”

  Her father’s laughter made Laurel’s throat ache with tears she couldn’t shed.

  “I never got on the federal gravy train,” he said. “Lots of guys did their time in the trenches and then retired with pay and went into private business. Real private. Most of them got rich buying and selling guns or airplanes or communications gear to friendly countries. Sometimes even to unfriendly ones.” He shrugged.

  “Did you?” Laurel asked before she could help herself.

  “Hell, no. I was too dumb. I believed the bullshit about country, loyalty, and God. Thirty years in the trenches and I didn’t get retirement. I didn’t get medical benefits. Neither did the other people like me. All we got was fucked.”

  Abruptly Swann turned to face his daughter. “I can’t file for Social Security for ten years, and let me tell you, I ain’t gonna last another ten years out there in East Bumfart, South America.”

  She wanted to look away from her father’s savage eyes, but couldn’t. She’d never seen him like this, a dark power and an even darker bitterness that was almost tangible.

  “But all that’s over now,” Swann said softly. “I’m coming back to live in a civilian world that loves splitting moral hairs. And I’m bringing my own brand of retirement with me. I sure as hell earned it.”

  Laurel looked at the crimson egg.

  “Yeah,” Swann said, following her glance. “I won’t have to pump gas or flip burgers or sell pints of blood for the next ten years so that I can buy dog food because it’s the only meat I can afford. And neither will you.”

  She swallowed against the emotions knotted in her throat. “The egg,” she said huskily. “Where did it come from?”

  “The less you know, the better off you’ll be. I shouldn’t have had it sent to you at all, but you were the only person in the world I could trust not to screw me over if I was late getting here.”

  She smiled sadly.

  Swann blew out a harsh breath from between compressed lips. “Well, it’s done now. Time only runs one way. I might as well put you to work finding the mechanism.”

  “What?”

  “The mechanism inside,” he said impatiently. “The egg was made to hold a ruby engraved with the likeness of Nicholas the Second. Then it all went from sugar to shit. He was executed before the gem could be engraved, and the rest is history.”

  Laurel closed her eyes, then opened them slowly. Nothing had changed. Her father was still looking at her with shuttered expectation.

  “The surprise,” she said.

  “Yeah, I suppose all this is a bit surprising to you. Sorry, baby. But life is full of nasty little surprises.”

  “Not that. The egg. The engraved gem is the surprise. All the imperial eggs had one.”

  A hard, amused smile transformed Swann’s face.

  “A surprise,” he said, turning back to the egg. “Yeah. It’s that, all right. But how the hell do I open it? I’ll slice it up if I have to, but I might damage something I can’t repair.”

  Something very close to anger snaked through Laurel. Abruptly she slid off the stool and began pacing, trying to control the emotions that were tearing at her. Her father might have wanted to protect her, but she had the distinct feeling that he was manipulating her at the same time.

  She wondered if he even knew what he was doing or if he had lived so long in a shadow world that he kept secrets even from himself.

  Swann picked up the egg in both hands and inspected the bottom end.

  “I can’t see a bloody thing,” he said, squinting at the golden latticework. “What about you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Laurie?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” she said through her teeth. “But then, I wasn’t looking.”

  Yet even as anger grew in her, so did guilt.

  She’d taken so many gifts from her father through the years, and never once had she asked what he’d sacrificed to send them. Now she felt sucked down into a whirlpool of loyalty and betrayal…and she no longer knew who was loyal and who was not, who was innocent and who was betrayed.

  If you’re sitting around arguing about perfect morality, somebody who doesn’t know moral from moron sticks a knife between your ribs.

  She shuddered and wondered how her father had lived for so many years with nothing but a whirlpool under his feet.

  “Did you look?” he asked.

  “For the mechanism?”

  “No, for the King of Siam. Jesus, Laurie. Get it together. The sooner I get inside this egg, the sooner I’ll be gone and the safer you’ll be. That’s what you want, isn’t it? A return to the world of your nice, safe, moral choices?”

  Guilt gnawed at her. She’d been wishing that none of this was happening, that she could go back to seeing her father through a child’s rose-colored glasses rather than the bleak clarity of adult eyes.

  Time only runs one way.

  “Did you steal the egg?” she asked.

  “It was stolen from crooks. That doesn’t count.”

  “How do you know they were crooks?”

  Impatiently Swann set the egg down in its cradle and turned toward her. The egg stayed upright only for an instant before it began to topple.

  Laurel grabbed it by reflex. “Be careful! You could break it.”

  “I’m going to get into that thing one way or another.” He glanced at the tools arrayed on a pegboard close to the workbench. “How about a chisel? You have one that’s up to the job?”

  “A chisel? Dad, that egg is a work of art.”

  “So is a dollar bill. Ask any counterfeiter.”

  Numbly Laurel shook her head. She finally understood what made her father good at what he did. He had a single-minded focus that blocked out everything but his goal. It was the kind of intense focus a pilot needed to bomb an enemy position in a cathedral or a radar emplacement next to a hospital. Pity, horror, sadness, guilt—those would come
after the mission was over.

  If they came at all.

  When Swann reached for the egg once more, Laurel discovered that her choice was made.

  As usual, her father had won.

  10

  Karroo

  Monday afternoon

  Cruz was fed up with watching Novikov waltz around every fact that Redpath tried to pull out of him. The Russian could outdance Baryshnikov.

  “Right,” Cruz cut in. “What we have now is an egg you say is real but has been stolen by person or persons unimaginable to you, and you want to hire us, then pin the rose on us when word of the theft gets out. Have I missed anything?”

  For an instant Novikov looked surprised. Cruz was indeed a more dangerous man now than he’d been before.

  “I do not know what you mean,” the Russian said evenly. “As I have said many times, I want the loss of the egg kept secret.”

  “Tell the thief,” Cruz said.

  “But he, or she, will want it kept quiet, is that not true?” Novikov pointed out.

  That does it. Cruz leaned forward. “Assuming the thief wants to sell the egg—and you’d have to be butt-stupid not to assume it—the thief will have to put out the word to potential buyers. Once it’s out, it’s out. You know it. I know it. So let’s just cut to the chase, whatever it is.”

  “I have told you many times, word must not get out,” Novikov said instantly.

  Cruz shrugged and said what he’d been saying. “Talk to the thief.”

  Novikov turned to Redpath.

  “The situation in Russia is exquisitely delicate,” Novikov said carefully. “There are people in power who did not want any of these treasures to leave the country.”

  Finally, Cruz thought as he crunched into an ice cube. Progress on the political front.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “They are what you call superpatriots. They feel that these objects are the soul of Russia and as such must be sheltered from impure eyes.”

  “Superpatriots?” Cruz said under his breath. “How about plain nuts?”

  Novikov didn’t look away from Redpath. His eyes were luminous with emotion. “Cassandra, please, you must track down the thieves before the loss of the Ruby Surprise becomes known.”