Men of Intrgue A Trilogy (35 page)

“I’m glad you think it’s so funny,” she retorted, offended.

“Come and sit down,” he said, extending his hand. “There are some deck chairs over here and a blanket.”

Karen’s fingers were swallowed up in his large callused palm as he led her to a seat and dropped into the ancient wooden lounge next to it. He unfolded a striped woolen blanket from the back of his chair and spread it over both of them.

“Better?” he said.

“Mm-hmm,” she replied, snuggling into the well worn softness of the lap robe and stretching out her legs.

“I was surprised to see this stuff here,” he said. “This isn’t exactly a cruise ship.”

“I imagine even Portuguese fishermen like to take a little nap on deck now and then.”

“I guess.” He leaned back and folded his arms on his chest, turning his head to look at her. “So,” he said. “What the hell was a nice New Jersey girl doing on that sun blasted rock in the middle of the West Indies? You look like you should be teaching kindergarten in Bergen County.” He dug in his pocket for another cigarette and lit it.

“I came to Almeria with my husband five years ago, for his job,” Karen explained.

Colter froze in the act of lifting his cigarette to his lips. His eyes traveled to her bare left hand, dimly visible in the light from the deck lantern behind them.

“You’re married?” he said.

“Divorced.”

His hand resumed its motion. “So why were you still in Ascension?”

“I stayed on after my ex-husband was transferred. I liked my job and saw no reason to give it up, and I had my apartment and my friends.”

“Your parents are dead?”

He asked the question as though he already knew the answer.

“Yes. I have a sister, but she’s married and has her own family. I didn’t want to intrude.”

“So you stuck it out on your own, huh?” he said. “You must be a loner.”

“Like you?” Karen suggested.

He didn’t answer. She saw the bright arc his cigarette made as he tossed it away.

“Steven?”

She saw his profile move in her direction.

“Steven?” he said.

“Isn’t that your name?” she asked, confused.

He shrugged. “Everybody calls me Colter, sometimes Steve. No one has called me Steven since—” He stopped abruptly.

“Since?” she prompted.

“I was a kid,” he finished gruffly. “A long time ago.”

“Do you mind if I do?”

“Why?”

“Well, you look like a Steven to me. And I don’t want to call you what everyone else does. I want to be different.”

“You already are,” he said huskily.

“Steven,” she said firmly.

“Yes?” he said brightly, like a contestant on a quiz show.

She giggled. “I want to ask you something.”

“Ask away.”

Karen hesitated. She was intensely curious about how he’d gotten into his line of work but she’d already seen how he resisted personal questions. So she attacked the problem philosophically by saying, “Isn’t it difficult to risk your life all the time?”

“Not if you haven’t much to lose,” he replied promptly.

His answer, stated in that flat, matter-of-fact tone, chilled her. She could tell that his fatalism wasn’t a pose, but a reflection of deep inner conviction. She had never heard such resignation in anyone’s voice.

“But surely you want to live?” she whispered.

“Well, I don’t want to die,” he answered reasonably, but it was too late to negate the impression he’d already created. A warning signal went off in the most primitive part of her brain: this man was trouble. But with the contrary instincts that had frustrated her parents and driven her poor husband to distraction, she was intrigued rather than frightened.

“Did you live in the U.S. until you got married?” Colter asked her, breaking the silence.

“Yes, with an aunt, my mother’s sister,” she answered. Karen went on, filling him in about her background. She found that it was remarkably easy to talk to him, despite their unorthodox meeting and current unsettled circumstances. Or maybe that
was
the reason conversation was so relaxed. Stripped of the artificiality of social convention and still elated by her recent rescue, she told Colter things she would be embarrassed to recall in the morning. And in the deepest part of the night, suspended in time on the vast ocean, he listened. He was a good listener. He seemed content to smoke and stare up at the bowl of stars suspended overhead, asking an occasional quiet question. In a powerful, unspoken way Karen found his presence comforting. When toward dawn she finally drifted into sleep, she was completely comfortable and unafraid for the first time in a week.

When the ship docked in Caracas, she was jolted awake. The lap robe fell to the floor as she stood. Sometime during the night Colter had left it folded carefully around her, tucked under her chin, and he’d added his fatigue jacket to combat the predawn chill. Wearing one of his garments and carrying the other, Karen went in search of him but he was nowhere to be found.

The first thing she saw as the crew scurried through the docking procedure was the crowd of reporters waiting to meet the boat. She went below, where Linda seized her as she rounded the corner toward the dining room.

“Where on earth have you been?” Linda whispered. “You were gone all night.”

“I fell asleep in a deck chair.”

“You fell asleep in a deck chair. Well, it may have escaped your notice, milady, but we are not arriving in Hamilton, Bermuda, and the Queen Mother’s equerry is not waiting to greet us. There is, however, a screaming mob of press people intending to pounce the minute we disembark.”

“I saw them. What are we going to do?”

“I know what I’m going to do. The embassy is sending over an escort to get us to a hotel in Caracas, and I will attach myself to them like the tail on Lady Astor’s horse. I suggest you do the same.”

Linda had just finished speaking when the embassy people arrived. Two impeccably dressed Englishmen advised the group that there were cars waiting to take them into Caracas. They would be housed at the Hotel Miramar as guests of Her Majesty’s government. A formal statement would be issued that day, and a press conference held in the afternoon. They expressed deep regret for the “inconvenience” the refugees had suffered and hoped that they would be comfortable in their new accommodations.

“I had bloody well better be comfortable, after all this,” Linda muttered to Karen. “Hang on—I want to see if one of them knows my father. I might be able to wangle a little something—one never can tell.”

Karen stood in the middle of the bedraggled group and wondered where Colter was. She hadn’t seen any of the mercenaries since she’d awakened. She was attempting to comb her hair with her fingers when Linda returned, wearing a secretive smile.

“What are you up to?” Karen asked knowingly. Linda handed her a laminated card.
 

“An embassy chit,” she said. “Good at the hotel for food, clothing, whatever you like. Have a ball.”

“You mean I just show this and any purchase will be charged to the embassy account?”

“Right you are. Better than American Express. Who needs money, I say.”

“Did you hear from your father?”
 

“Oh, yes. He says stiff upper lip and all that. Something tells me my next job will be around the corner from his office in Berkely Street.”

They were ushered up onto the deck of the boat into warm weather and a bright morning, then herded down the gangway toward the waiting vehicles.

The reporters attacked as soon as they caught sight of the hostages. Karen turned her face away as they shouted questions and tried to shove microphones at anyone who passed. It was like running a gauntlet. She and Linda, along with two of the other women, collapsed into the back seat of the embassy’s stretch limousine gasping for breath. The driver took off almost before the doors had closed behind them.

Karen’s first sight of downtown Caracas was a blur of old buildings and shiny new shops, narrow streets thronged with traffic, and dark handsome people bearing the marks of both Indian ancestry and the later Spanish settlement. They bypassed the impressive front entrance of the hotel, where more reporters were waiting, and pulled up to the service door at the back.

“Good Lord, what a ghastly experience,” Linda said. “No wonder everyone hates the press. How on earth did they find out where we were and where we were going?”

“Who knows?” Karen answered. “They always do.”

They were led through the kitchen and up the service passage to the second floor, which had apparently been cleared for them.

“I must arrive this way again,” Linda said, as they waited in a conference chamber at the end of the corridor to be assigned their rooms. “It always takes so long to register in a foreign hotel.”

Finally they were given their keys, and a warning that if they wandered about the premises they would be easy targets for the press. She and Linda took adjoining rooms. Karen collapsed on the bed as soon as she had fastened the lock and pulled the shades to shut out the blinding equatorial sunlight.

Her room, like the rest of the hotel, was ostentatiously over decorated. The curtains and the spread on her bed were a cabbage rose chintz, the red of which matched the wall-to-wall carpeting and the tasseled lamp shades. A gold and crystal chandelier overhead complemented a gold flecked fleur-de-lis wallpaper. She could see that the adjacent bathroom carried out the gold and red motif, with gold fixtures on the sink and tub and deep red plush towels. She expected Lily Langtry and Edward the Seventh to walk in at any moment and supposed that the bill presented to the British embassy would reflect the Regency decor.

Her telephone rang and she didn’t know whether to answer it. She seized the receiver. If it were a reporter she could always hang up.

“Hello?” she said.

“My word,” Linda’s voice exclaimed, “what do you think of this place? A bit much, isn’t it?”

“I guess it’s nice, if you like such an ornate style.”

“Darling, it’s as dated as the Dave Clark Five. I’m sure it hasn’t been renovated since Jack the Ripper was on the prowl. Did you order from room service?”

“I will later. I feel kind of tired. I couldn’t sleep last night and I think I’ll take a nap. Do you know when we’re going to be flying out of here?”

“They’re supposed to come around and take ticket orders, ship us all back where we came from on the earliest plane. I was just told that many of the rebels are still at large, and the Government House has been closed indefinitely. I guess returning to Almeria will be out of the question for a while, maybe permanently.”

Karen thought about that for a moment. It was difficult to realize that everything was changed: her home for the past five years, her job, her life.

“Karen, you there?” Linda said.

“Yes. Look, I’m going to sign off and get some rest. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Fine. Bye-bye.”

“Goodbye.”

Karen hung up the phone and lay back on the bed, limp with exhaustion. She fell asleep in minutes. When she woke up late afternoon sun was seeping through the shades and slanting across her bed.

There were two slips of paper under her door. They were cables, one from her sister and one from Ian, expressing concern about her captivity and relief that she was all right. Wire services had carried the news of the rescue and Grace said the story was on television constantly.

Karen smiled to herself as she put the telegrams on the dressing table. This was the closest she would ever come to celebrity.

There was a knock at her door.

“Who is it?” she called.

“Delivery for you,
senorita,
” an accented voice said in English.

Karen opened the door to a uniformed bellboy who presented her with a huge wicker basket of pastel gladioli. The thing was almost bigger than she was.

“Are you sure this is for me?” she asked the boy, who deposited the flowers on the carved writing desk in her room. He peeled off the yellow cellophane wrapping to expose the dewy blooms, then stood back to admire the effect.

“Oh, yes,” the boy told her. “Senorita Walsh from the Almerian group, the order to our florist was very clear.” He handed her a small white card and made for the door.

“Wait, oh, I haven’t any money,” she said, dismayed.

“
De nada, senorita,
I already get,” the boy said mysteriously and left.

Karen looked at the card, wondering what the bellboy “already got.”

“Thanks for your help,” she read. “I’d like to take you to dinner to show my appreciation. I’ll be by for you at eight.” It was signed, “Colter.”

Karen stared at the bold masculine handwriting, thinking that the delivery boy’s remark was now explained. Colter had tipped him in advance, which accounted for his solicitousness with the flowers, and now the mercenary was going to arrive for her in three hours.

She had nothing to wear.

Chapter 2