Swarzwalder drowning …
Then Peters had arrived in the room, swooping down on Swarzwalder like some white-eyed angel of death wielding a scythe of leather and steel. The loop of leather had dropped around Swarzwalder’s neck and the big man had exploded backward in a blur of motion.
John did not remember getting to his feet. His next recollection was of standing, paralyzed by confusion and indecision, watching as Swarzwalder broke free. At that point, he had expected Swarzwalder to kill Peters and then come back after him. Swarzwalder had done neither. Instead, clutching at his broken throat, the big man had turned away from Peters. Toward him.
And pointed at the bed.
Swarzwalder floundering in the water: Swarzwalder, who didn’t usually rise particularly early, drowning in a dawn sea …
“Things here …”
Suddenly Alexandra had burst into the room. The radio had blared; Alexandra had attacked. He had tried to stop them and been knocked unconscious. He had regained consciousness to find Swarzwalder lying dead, his neck broken, a tiny rivulet of blood leaking into his shirt.
John shook his head. Why had Swarzwalder pointed at the bed? Or had he been pointing at the suitcase? Alexandra’s barrette? Why?
Barrette.
Alexandra had used her barrette to stab Swarzwalder.
At the time, John had simply assumed that Swarzwalder had searched Alexandra’s luggage first and for some reason kept the barrette. But why would the man do that? he wondered. Why pick up such an insignificant item in the first place, what’s more hang onto it?
The barrettes were from the past, John thought, and in that past he had never known Alexandra to carry an extra barrette with her. Why should she bring an extra barrette for a one-week trip to San Sierra?
Swarzwalder had been searching Peters’ suitcase, John thought, not Alexandra’s. Peters had been carrying the barrette in his suitcase.
There was something about the barrette.
Swarzwalder had been trying to warn him about Peters, John thought. Swarzwalder had been following him on that morning; the drowning had been staged. Swarzwalder had been trying all along to protect him from Peters.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Finway?”
John, dazed, slowly looked around to find Raul standing beside him. The gnomish Sierran had an anxious expression on his face. “What did you say?” John asked distantly.
“You dropped your coffee.”
John absently glanced down to see that the front of his slacks was stained with coffee; he had never even felt the warm liquid spill on him. He heard a rattling sound, his plastic cup rolling away.
“You know, amigo, I think I’d like to stay.”
“I don’t understand,” Raul said tightly.
John brushed casually at the stains on his slacks, then smiled broadly at the Sierran. Control, he thought. “Something just clicked inside my mind, Raul. What the hell; my marriage is finished, and I just realized that I don’t really give a damn. It’s a good feeling, let me tell you.”
“I’m sure it is, Mr. Finway, but—”
“I feel like celebrating. Come on, amigo, I’ll buy you a drink.”
Raul shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Finway. You can’t—”
“Hey Raul!” John said sharply. He struggled to keep smiling, to remain calm. “Why the hell shouldn’t I see Angeles Blanca too? I think I’ll stay and finish this tour just to show my wife I don’t give a damn what she does.”
Raul’s eyes went wide, and his pudgy hands clenched into fists. “You must get on the plane, Mr. Finway.”
“This is important to me, Raul,” John said, gripping the other man’s arms. “You saw what happened at Sierras Negras. I made an ass out of myself. I was humiliated. You’re a man; you can understand why I’d like to salvage a little dignity and self-respect. All I’m asking is that you let me finish the trip with the others. Let me leave San Sierra like a man.”
“You are not well, Mr. Finway. You don’t know what you want. You must go home and rest. You’ll be there in a few hours.” He paused, shrugged nervously. “Besides, how can I get your bags back?”
John stared intently at the other man for a long time as he concentrated on keeping his breathing even. “Have my bags sent on to New York,” he said at last. “I don’t need them.”
“You must go. It’s been arranged.”
“We’ll compromise. My wife and Peters will be at the Coconut Club right now with the rest of the group. Zip me over there just long enough for me to tell Alexandra I don’t give a damn anymore. I promise you I’ll keep it private and won’t make a scene. All I want is five minutes—one minute!—alone with my wife. How about it?”
“No, Mr. Finway. Please sit down and try to relax.”
“You sit down and try to relax!” John snapped, abruptly stepping around Raul and heading for one of the three exits. “I paid for this trip, and no one’s officially told me that I’m being thrown out of the country. I’m goddamn well going back with the others. If you won’t take me, I’ll walk or hitch a ride.”
“Guard! Guard!”
John stopped walking as he saw the soldiers snap to attention, blocking off the exits.
Think! You’ve got to get out of here!
He wheeled and strode quickly back to Raul. He wrapped his fingers tightly around the Sierran’s upper arms and lifted the other man up on his toes. “Listen to me, you stupid little bastard,” John said through clenched teeth. “Rick Peters is planning to kill Manuel Salva and my wife. If you don’t let me out of here, he’s probably going to get away with it.”
Raul’s eyes seemed to swell in his head until they appeared like chocolate-brown balloons inflated with shock and panic. “You are a crazy man!” he blubbered. “Get away from me! Guard!”
John fought against the panic rising in him, clouding his mind. He could go quietly with the guards and try to get someone in authority to listen to him, but there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t be ignored; his story could easily fall through the cracks of a bureaucracy notorious for being filled with people who loathed making decisions or upsetting their superiors.
Think!
Even if the authorities did believe him and decide to go after Peters, it could easily be mishandled and Alexandra could die. If Peters didn’t kill her, the Sierrans might—if not by design, by accident. Alexandra would end up a hostage, and saving her life would not be high on the Sierran’s list of priorities. The Sierrans might decide that the easiest way to deal with the dragons was to shoot them both.
Once he went with the guards, the matter would be completely out of his hands; he would be totally dependent upon the Sierran authorities to save Alexandra’s life.
Suddenly, with absolute clarity, John understood that Alexandra would die if he could not get to her.
He could hear the guards’ footsteps directly behind him. There was only one way left to go, and John knew he did not have the time or the courage to consciously debate whether or not he could survive the attempt. The time for thinking was over, and he allowed the volatile fuel of residual panic to flow through him unchecked, launching him into an action his mind would call madness but which his heart, his love for his wife and children, demanded. He slammed his fist into Raul’s face, then sprinted toward the bank of windows.
Pieces of rational thought danced in the fire within him; it occurred to him that the glass would be heavily reinforced and that he would break his neck or cut his throat if he tried to go through it headfirst. As he ran he instinctively pulled the collar of his jacket up around his neck and hunched his shoulders. He leaped up on a chair to catapult himself the last few feet, somersaulting in the air at the last second so that his back absorbed the force of his impact with the glass.
It felt as though he were hitting a wall, but then the window exploded around him and he tumbled out into the hot night air amid a shower of glass. His forehead, hands, and right thigh suddenly burned with what felt like bee stings, but he had chosen
his spot correctly; he tumbled through the air and landed hard on a metal surface that gave slightly under him as it emitted a loud bass-drum sound. Disoriented and out of breath, John reflexively threw his arms across his face to protect his eyes from the shards of glass raining on him, then rolled to his right. He fell off the top of the truck to the roof of the cab, then slid down the windshield and fender to the ground. He landed on the macadam and immediately started running.
He stumbled and fell, cushioning the shock with hands that were warm and slippery with blood. In an instant he was up and running again, racing directly away from the terminal building toward the field of darkness beyond a network of runways trimmed with tiny, bright lights.
There were sounds behind him like a multitude of popping champagne corks, and John realized that the guards were shooting at him with their automatic weapons. The macadam around him erupted in small, black puffs. His lungs burned, and he had lost feeling in his legs. He put his head down and pumped his arms as he ran across an alleyway of light. Then he was past the first runway. He tripped and rolled onto a dry, ragged carpet of grass as bullets whined in the night around him.
Friday, January 25; 12:07 A.M.
Alexandra
“Do you believe this chickenshit?” Peters whispered. “This must be what they think Las Vegas is like, without the gambling. Outrageous.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Alexandra said with an amused, casual shrug. “I think it’s all rather quaint.”
“Obviously, there are some things the revolution didn’t change.”
Alexandra’s initial reaction to Angeles Blanca’s open-air Coconut Club had been one of wry amusement. If it were not so difficult to spend money in San Sierra, and if there were not so few travelers to begin with, she would have thought the club a typical tourist trap.
Upon arrival, their group had been ushered to six of a hundred or so tables that had been set end-to-end to form dozens of arrow-straight, cramped rows radiating from the lip of a vast, multilevel stage that had been constructed between and around the massive trunks of five towering trees. The trees were lit by cleverly hidden spotlights of different colors, creating a startling and not unpleasant contrast to the garish neon illumination in the seating area.
However, contrary to her first impression, Alexandra had soon learned that the nightclub was not primarily set up for tourists. Maria had informed her that an evening at the Coconut Club—like everything else in San Sierra that was classified as sport or entertainment—was offered as a reward to the workers who, like the tourist groups, were brought to the club in buses. Again like the tourists, each worker was given two weak rum-based drinks of his choice.
“You’d think they’d at least have an ample supply of Stolichnaya,” Alexandra said, sipping her drink.
“They’ve got it; they’re just damn careful how they dole it out. You know the old story about alcoholism in the Workers’ Paradises of the world.”
Alexandra did not share Peters’ contempt for the show in progress on the great, extended stage. While she agreed that the dance acts and thinly veiled political skits were amateurish, hopelessly heavy-handed, and outdated, she found the sinuous, continuous movement on the many tiers of platforms and webs of rope ladders in the trees above the stage spectacular and strangely haunting. Gaudily plumed “bird women” materialized high up in the glowing foliage and danced along swaying rope bridges as male dancers gyrated to an infectious, fist-hard beat laid down by bare-chested drummers on a bewildering array of percussion instruments. Perhaps it was kitsch, Alexandra thought, but it was sincere kitsch. The Sierrans were openly proud of their nightclub, and Alexandra found that she was enjoying herself.
She fingered the four blue and pink swizzle sticks in front of her, slowly forming them into a square. “Get me another drink, would you, Rick?” she asked pleasantly.
Peters grunted with amusement and arched his eyebrows. “Your wish is my command, m’dear. May I count on you getting drunk?”
“That’s not likely to happen with this stuff. God, what I’d give for some Scotch.”
“One triple Scotch for m’lady as soon as we get back on the plane,” Peters said, rising and starting to make his way down the narrow aisle between the tables.
She wasn’t even close to being drunk, Alexandra thought. She felt immune to liquor; it was as if the alcohol she had consumed were circulating somewhere in an outer shell, away from her mind. She felt deeply submerged within herself, viewing the people and activity around her as if through a kind of psychic periscope. She found it a very pleasant sensation; like some potent narcotic, it gave her a floating feeling of easy peace and total command, superiority and power.
She had been in this deep place before, she thought, and she recalled—vaguely, distantly, as in a dream—that hard sex could cause her to surface for brief periods. Sex and pain.
It had happened, Alexandra thought matter-of-factly. The familiar metamorphosis of which she had once been terrified was almost complete.
However, now that she was settling back into this dark place in her mind, Alexandra could not remember exactly what there was about its psychic geography of which she had been so afraid. She was different from other people, she thought. Like Rick. People who could change into dragons formed an elite. As Rick had reminded her, the two of them were special people with special needs.
It had simply been too much before, Alexandra thought as she lazily traced her index finger around the perimeter of the square formed by the swizzle sticks. She had stayed at it too long; being in constant danger twenty-four hours a day, day in and day out, year after year, would burn out anyone. But she understood now—as she had understood then, but had run away from—that this work was undeniably what she did best. She liked being a member of a small elite, and she knew she was going to be reluctant to leave it again. She would not leave it again. She had three beautiful children whom she loved very much, she thought, but her children, like John and her home, were part of a phase of her life that was finished now. Pomona was no longer enough for her. She was ready for a change. The situation was certainly different now from what it had been when the dragons had been born, and she hoped the CIA would accomodate her with a post. She wanted to be with people who appreciated how very special she was and who could use her very special talents.
She felt Peters’ hand gently caress the nape of her neck a moment before he placed her drink in front of her. The sensation of the hand on her flesh was pleasant, and Alexandra arched her neck slightly.
“Your drink, m’lady,” Peters said as he slid back into his chair.
“Thank you,” Alexandra said huskily. She looked directly into his pale, bottomless eyes as she slowly raised her glass. “Here’s to the good guys.”
Peters grinned broadly. The blue-white eyes glinted with genuine amusement as he raised his own glass. “To the good guys, wherever they may be,” he replied. He laughed and drained his glass.
“Speaking of said good guys,” Alexandra murmured, lowering her voice as she moved closer to Peters, “how do you want to handle our business at Tamara Castle?”
Peters inclined his head toward Alexandra until his lips were touching her ear. “I found out from Constantina that there are twelve other people who requested tickets to the matches.” His tongue flicked out and touched her earlobe. Alexandra tensed slightly, but she did not move away. “We’ll talk about it later. Too close quarters here.”
“All—” Suddenly Alexandra was aware of Peters’ hand resting on her knee. The feel of his fingers gently kneading, slipping around and exerting pressure on the soft, sensitive flesh behind her knee had an almost paralyzing effect. She realized with only vague surprise that she wanted Peters to make love to her. But not yet.
“Goddamn,” Peters whispered hoarsely, his voice breathy and quavering. “It’s been a long time.”
Alexandra swallowed and slowly ran her tongue over her lips. Rum and desire made her mouth feel dry and cottony.
T
he hand moved up the inside of her thigh; his stroking was gentle, yet insistent. “I can tell things have changed,” he said. “You’re not going back to John, are you?”
Alexandra started to move away, but found she couldn’t. She didn’t want to. It was as if Peters, using no more than the gentle pressure of his fingers and palm, were able to control her mind and body.
“It’s true.”
“I don’t know, Rick. This isn’t the time for decisions like that.”
Peters’ hand was between her legs now. He slipped three fingers beneath the elastic legband of her panties, shifted his body slightly, and tried to thread his middle finger up her sex. Floating in her deep, warm place, Alexandra badly wanted to spread her legs and let the stiff finger slide up and into her. On the evening before the event that would mark the end of their task and the beginning—the resumption—of an exciting career, she found that she wanted to be masturbated as she drank and listened to the music and watched the dancers.
“God, Rick,” she sighed, surfacing slightly, focusing her will and shifting her hips away from the insistent, probing finger. “Not here.”
“Come on, baby.”
“After … the boxing matches,” Alexandra said in a trembling voice. She pressed a cold, sweating glass against her hot forehead and shuddered as the flesh contracted. “Maybe after the matches. I’ve got enough to think about right now, Rick. Let’s both keep our minds on business until we’re out of this.”
“Let’s do it now.”
“Excuse me, please! Let me through, please!”
The pressing fingers left her leg. Out of the corner of her eye, Alexandra saw Peters bring his hand from beneath the tablecloth and place it back on top of the table. With Peters, she twisted around to watch a battered-looking Raul squeezing his way down the aisle between the tables. The Sierran’s face turned a familiar shade of crimson as the people whose vision he obstructed hissed at him.
Turn Loose the Dragons Page 24
