Touch of Magic (33 page)

The .38 in her right hand felt unwieldy yet com
forting. Her eyes tried to pierce the shadows. She moved from the shelter of boulder to boulder, the
slowness of her progress making her want to gnash
her teeth. At last she glimpsed the line of a roof and,
a few moments later, an entire side of the former
Desert View Clinic. It was three-storied, solid
looking. There were bars at the windows. A faint light
shone in an upper room.

Swallowing again, Channing began to pick her
way toward the side of the building, avoiding the main door. She paused, her senses scanning the
darkness for movement or sound. All she could hear was the drumming of her own blood. Was its loud
ness an illusion, like something seen-yet-not-seen
performed on stage, or would real sound be audible?
She held her breath, then started forward again.

Another endless flow of seconds, and then con
tours took form ahead of her, dismayingly identifi
able. A swimming pool, with a high chain-link
fence, abutted this end of the building. She gritted
her teeth to keep from swearing aloud.

Entry, if she could make it, might have to be over
echoing concrete here. The back of the building
would surely be guarded. No choice remained but
to backtrack as carefully as she'd come, setting
course for the opposite side.

She did not see the shadow until it sprang. Brutal
arms drove down to knock the gun from her hand.
Channing reacted instinctively, slicing her elbow
back and up into someone's belly, stepping side
ways in a vain attempt to knock her attacker off-
balance.

But she was in the hands of a trained fighter. She
was spun around, kicked in the groin, whirled again
by the scruff of her neck. She glimpsed a face -- the
sullen young woman with long black hair. Some
species of long-nosed automatic rifle glinted in her
hand. Channing almost
froze.
Instead
she seized the woman's wrist and tried to
slam it against the boulder at her back. A stronger arm resisted her own, and some part of the rifle smashed against the side of her head, momentarily dazing her.

Channing staggered, aware the woman was behind her, aware she was losing. She tried to fight, but her whole right arm was wrenched up behind her, pinned there by the woman's left hand. Then, in the course of a second, Channing felt the barrel
of the rifle plunge deep into the opening of her ear.

Twenty-four

"I would love to kill you, American woman!"

The words hissed into Channing's left ear. The barrel of the rifle stabbed unrelentingly into the
other.
Its
cold invasiveness created a terror of
which Channing hadn't known she was capable. She couldn't force herself to open her eyes.

"
Ballieu
was so sure you were harmless -- so sure
you would do nothing without the man," the voice
at her head continued. "I'm going to shove you into his teeth! I'm going to show him what a fool he is!"

She gave Channing a vicious shove, and Chan
ning stumbled. The woman twisted her arm still higher. Channing cried out.

But the rifle was out of her ear now, merely
pressed to her temple. Gasping, Channing allowed herself a single sideways glance at its menacing
shape and the arm that was holding it.

Her free hand stole to her waist. It closed on the
hilt of her
kunjar
. She had to regain her breath. She
had to remember she was a Stuart, faster and more sure with her hands than most members of the human race. She had to remember Tony. And Ellery.

The training of her hands through her lifetime had made her almost ambidextrous. In a single lightning-quick move she brought the J-shaped
knife free of its sheath and up. Its curved inner edge
drove into the underside of her captor's forearm
and jerked it upward. There was a sickening feel of blade against bone. A shriek from the woman be
hind her. The rifle sputtered bullets ineffectually as
it fell to the ground.

Channing spun, behind her attacker now. She jerked the woman's good arm up as hers had been
jerked, and pinned the blood-wet inner curve of the
kunjar
tight against the woman's throat.

"One move and your neck will feel worse than your arm," she said. In a flash she knew she was capable of what she was threatening. "Take me in
side."

The woman in front of her was keening, cursing in Arabic, trying to clutch her injured arm against her body. It wasn't spurting. An artery hadn't been severed. Recalling the maimed child who had died in her arms in Beirut, Channing found she almost
wished her aim had been better.

"You'll never get inside!" the woman spat.

"Move!" Channing shoved her.

They stumbled along like two members of a chain
gang. When they reached the front door of the old clinic, the woman in front of her started to call out.
Channing tightened the
kunjar
against her throat. The woman's words to whoever was inside were
muted and terse.

The door opened. Two men, one with a mus
tache, one with a beard, leveled ugly little rifles like
their colleague had aimed at Channing.

"Let her go," said the one with the mustache.

He spoke slowly and with a thick accent. Chan
ning shoved the woman free.

"Sure. Just take me to
Ballieu
."

That was all she had wanted. She was in. She was
still alive. She could do what she'd been sent to do.
If they'd killed Ellery, her switch of the film would
be for him.

The terrorist with the beard gestured toward the knife in her hand. She had no choice but to drop it.
The men caught her on either side to drag her into a
dim main hall.

"I need a tourniquet!" The woman gasped.

The sneer on the man with the beard made Chan
ning fear she might never reach
Ballieu
.

"There's something about that film
Ballieu
doesn't know," she said, addressing herself to the
one with the mustache. "If you don't take me to him, he'll have your heads when he finds out!"

They merely looked at her. Like carnivores, not
people.

"I have friends out there!" she said curtly.

"She's lying!" said the woman who had attacked
her. "There are no others."

She had pulled off a scarf and was trying to tie it
around her arm.

The man with the beard caught Channing and began to push her up a flight of stairs.

*
  
*
  
*

Ellery had been drifting in and out of consciousness, but now he tried to maneuver his fingers up to
the ropes he felt binding his wrists. He'd been dumped in a chair. He couldn't remember much
that had happened since Max had jumped him
there in the bungalow. He'd sensed something and
turned an instant before Max's gun hit his skull, but
the blow had dazed him.

Max had worked him over pretty well after that.
Or maybe it had been
Ballieu
. They'd wanted a
hostage, or they would have killed him.
Ballieu
had
been pissed about something -- that Max had
jumped ahead of schedule and they were having to
move out early. They must have been in this place
several hours, waiting until they could open the
safe.

Fuzzily Ellery realized he wasn't making any
progress with the ropes. His muscles were rubbery.
His movements were uncoordinated. And he heard
voices in the room with him. He wasn't alone.

Abandoning his efforts, he tried to fix on his surroundings. He was in a large room, bare except for a desk and a couple of chairs.
Ballieu
stood behind the
desk. Behind
Ballieu
, in the back wall, a huge vault
large enough to step into stood half open.

Ellery forced his sluggish eyes to focus. What was
Ballieu
doing? Just finishing a look at the film, it
appeared, examining it with a
loupe
. As Ellery
watched,
Ballieu
put the small magnifying glass
away and very carefully deposited the film he was
holding in a padded envelope.

"A pleasure doing business with you,
Ballieu
."

That was Max's voice.

His field of clear vision enlarging, Ellery saw Max
standing at one corner of the desk counting stacks of money into an attaché case. He flourished one
bundle as if tipping a hat. It was evident from
Bal
lieu's
expression that
Ballieu
didn't like him.

Son of a bitch,
Ballieu
and I have something in
common, thought Ellery, his anger reviving him.
Stinking Max. Wisecracking, good on the job -- and a
turncoat.

"Well, look who's joining the party," Max said,
noticing him.

Max's eyes were bright. Ellery knew there was no
good humor in his needling now, only malice. Maybe it had always been there, underneath.

"You know, Billy," Max said cheerfully, snapping
the lid on the attaché case. "If you weren't such a
straight arrow, I might have cut you in on this.
We've always been good together. And it seems like
such a shame, one man having all this money."

"Yeah. I can see you're torn up," Ellery said.
There was pain in his lungs -- as though he'd swallowed water somewhere along the line. He realized his clothes were soaked. "What did you do, Max,
plan to jump those couriers or just stumble across
them?"

He hated to give Max credit for planning that
well.

Max sauntered toward him.

"Hey, I'm not the criminal type. Opportunity
knocked and I answered. I'd spent all afternoon in
that stinking meeting listening to people say how
good you were after I'd had my ass chewed. When I
started to my car, there came the couriers ..."

With childlike playfulness he made a gun with his
fingers and pantomimed firing -- twice.

"Seemed like a wise career move."

Tense and straining for the first sound of the heli
copter that was to come for them shortly, Henri
Ballieu
watched with increasing contempt the posturing of the American who had sold him the film.
The man played. He was irresponsible. He had
beaten his fellow agent beyond what was necessary,
simply for his own satisfaction, then thrown him
into the pool outside so he'd revive just to hear this
crowing. The sort of personal indulgence that made
a man prone to failure,
Ballieu
thought.

There had been an interval at the start of this
night when
Ballieu
himself hadn't been completely
confident of success, despite his planning. Mildred
Farrow had called, weeping, to say she'd sprained
her ankle and couldn't keep their date. Just at the moment when he might need one, he'd been short
a hostage. Almost immediately the phone had rung
again, and the American turncoat announced
tersely that he'd just taken care of his partner and
was leaving for the bungalow -- ahead of schedule.

Ballieu
had been furious at the American's rash
ness, but things had gone smoothly enough. Now strength was pounding in him. An old vitality had
returned, for he knew he stood on the brink of
success. A helicopter had been hired in a nearby
town with orders to fly in at a precise time as part of
a movie being filmed at this location. With a gun to
his head the pilot would not object to flying them
across the border. Very little could go wrong at this
point, yet relaxing too soon, gloating over one's vic
tory, would be the sort of mistake made by the
crooked American.