I decided not to make the climb up the rope to the roof; instead, I jumped up on the balcony railing and cut part way through the rope, weakening it just enough so if someone attempted to descend it again, it wouldn’t hold the intruder’s weight, dropping him into the courtyard ten floors below. Candy reappeared at the balcony door just as I jumped from the railing. She stifled a scream, then saw that it was me.
“Nick, what—?”
“Just making certain no one else uses that route tonight,” I said. “How’s Sherima?”
“She’s out like a light. I think she took a couple of extra tranquilizers, Nick. I had given her two before she went to bed, but I noticed just now in my bathroom that the bottle was on the sink. I counted them, and there seem to be at least two less than I should have.”
“You’re sure she’s all right?” I was concerned that the former Queen might have unintentionally overdosed.
“Yes. I checked her breathing and it’s normal, maybe just a little slow. I’m sure that she’s only had four of my pills, and that’s just enough to put her out for ten or twelve hours.”
I could tell from the looks Candy was giving me that she was full of questions. I delayed having to come up with the answers for a while, by asking her: “How about you? Why were you awake? Didn’t you take something to make you sleep, too?”
“I guess I got so involved in getting Sherima quieted down and off to bed that I just forgot, Nick. I flopped down across my bed finally and started to read. I must have dozed off for an hour or so without having taken any tranquilizers. When I woke up, I came in to check on Sherima, and that’s when I heard a noise on her balcony… you know what happened after that.” She paused, then said abruptly, “Nick, who are you, really?”
“No questions, now, Candy. They can wait until we get to my room. Wait here a minute.”
I vaulted the divider again and carried the dead Arab into my room, stashing him in the shower and pulling the curtain across the tub, just in case Candy should go into the bathroom. Then I returned to Sherima’s balcony and lifted Candy over the divider, following with what I hoped was my final vault of the night.
Candy was hesitant about entering the room, and I realized she probably expected to see the dead man on the floor. I led her inside and closed the sliding door after us. I had turned on the lights when I’d been inside before to conceal the corpse. Candy looked quickly around the room, then breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t see him anywhere. She turned to me and said, “Now can you tell me, Nick?”
She looked directly at me, her eyes wide and unblinking as she clutched the sheer peignoir over its matching gown. I put an arm around her and led her to the couch. Sitting j down beside her, I took her hands in mine. Having worked out in my mind what I hoped would be a plausible story, I started to talk.
“My name is really Nick Carter, Candy, and I do work for the oil company, but I’m not so much a lobbyist as I am a private investigator. Normally, I handle security checks on personnel, or, if one of our people gets in trouble, I try to smooth out the rough spots and make sure there aren’t headlines that would make the company look bad. I have a license to carry my gun, and a couple of times overseas, I’ve had to use it. I started to carry the knife after I got into a pretty rough tangle in Cairo once— a couple of thugs took the gun away from me, and I ended up in the hospital.”
“But why are you here now? Is it because of Sherima?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “We got word from our office in Saudi Arabia that there might be an attempt made on her life. The threat didn’t sound too serious, but the home office decided to send me here, just in case. If somebody did try something and I could save her, the company reckoned that Shah Hassan would be mighty grateful to us — our firm has been trying to get in good with him for some time. There still are a lot of potential oil reserves in Adabi that haven’t been leased to anybody for exploration and my bosses would like to have a crack at them.”
She seemed to be trying to accept my explanation, but asked an obvious question, “Shouldn’t the American government have been told about the threat to Sherima? Isn’t it their job to protect her?”
“For awhile, I thought so, too,” I said, trying to appear embarrassed. “But the people who pay my salary, and it’s a good one, want to come off being the good guys if anything should happen. There’s billions at stake if they can get drilling rights in Adabi. And, to be honest and fair to them, I don’t think anyone really took the threat seriously. There didn’t seem to be any reason for anyone to want to kill Sherima. Maybe if she still were married to Hassan, but it didn’t seem to us that after the divorce, she was in danger.”
“But that man on the balcony… do you think he was trying to hurt Sherima?”
“I don’t know for sure. He could have been just a robber, though the coincidence of his being an Arab has me wondering now.”
“What about those men in Georgetown tonight? Was that coincidence, too?”
“That was a coincidence, I’m sure. I checked with a friend of mine at District police headquarters just a little while ago and he tells me that the three men they found in the street out there all have records as muggers or petty thieves. It looks like they were prowling around looking for likely victims and spotted us leaving the restaurant, saw we had a limousine but were starting to walk, so they followed us.”
“Did you tell him about your shooting them? Are we going to have to answer questions and go through a police investigation? Sherima will just die if she gets involved in that kind of thing. She’s trying so hard not to embarrass Hassan.”
I explained that I hadn’t let on to my supposed police friend that I knew anything about the incident in Georgetown, other than just saying that I had been in the area at the time and saw all the police cars and wondered what had happened. “I got the feeling the police think those blacks made the mistake of trying to rip off some big drug dealers or something, and muffed it. I don’t reckon the police are going to try too hard to find out who killed them. They probably feel that it’s three less thugs they have to worry about being on the streets.”
“Oh, Nick, it’s all so horrible,” she whispered, snuggling up against me. “What if somebody is trying to hurt Sherima? What if you’d gotten killed?” She was quiet for a moment, deep in thought. Then, suddenly, she jerked erect and turned blazing eyes on me. “Nick, what about us? Was meeting me part of your job? Were you supposed to make me fall for you just so you could stick close to Sherima?”
I couldn’t let her believe that, so I pulled her to me almost roughly and kissed her deeply in spite of her struggling. When I released her, I said, “Lovely lady, my orders were not to even make contact with Sherima, or anyone with her, unless some threat developed. My bosses arranged for me to have this room next to hers, yes, but my meeting you was strictly an honest-to-goodness accident. A wonderful one, too, it turned out. But when the company finds out I’ve been hanging around with you and Sherima, I’m in for big trouble. Especially if they think I might have done anything that could goof them up later when they try to get those oil leases.”