As she often did when her eyes lit on beauty, she thought of her home in Marrakech, of the beauty with which her benefactor, her captor, her teacher, surrounded himself. He had been an aesthete. He taught her how to appreciate all forms of art that brought beauty and joy to his life. “For me, there is nothing else,” he told her once. “Without art, without beauty, the world is an ugly place, and life the ugliest of all states.” She had thought about this when she escaped his airless, obsessive museum-villa. She had thought about it many times afterward, after every kill, after sitting through a concert or visiting an art gallery, or flying high above the earth from assignment to assignment. As she did tonight, with Don Fernando asleep in the next room, faced once again with both the beauty and the ugliness of the world, of life.
She closed her eyes and ears to everything but the rushing of her blood. She heard her heartbeat as it might sound to a doctor. Her torso swayed a little as she drifted into a deep meditative state. She was back in Marrakech, amid the incense, chased silver services, the intricate filigreed wood screens, the colorful tiled floors and walls made up of geometric shapes. She was her young self again, imprisoned.
She opened her eyes and found that she held her handbag in her lap, cradling it as one would a toy poodle. Without looking, she opened it, feeling around for what appeared to be a book of matches. She took it out. It said Moulin Rouge on one side. Where the striker ought to be was a thin metal rod. When she dug a nail beneath it and pulled, a nylon filament unspooled to a length of eighteen inches. She had constructed this murder weapon herself, using principles handed down by the hashashin, the ancient Persian sect whose objective was to assassinate Christian knight infidels.
She stood so abruptly that her handbag slid off her lap to the carpet. Landing, it made no sound. On bare feet, she picked her way across the living room, to the doorway beyond which Don Fernando lay asleep in his bed.
He had told her that he was different from all the other men in her life, men who had sought to manipulate her in one way or another, bend her to their own ends, use her like a gun or a knife, to work out their need for power and revenge.
From the moment she stepped aboard his plane, Don Fernando’s plan to turn her from her assignment had been set in motion. He had played on her long-buried emotions, bringing her face to face with her past, her dead father, her demented mother. He had brought her home, seeking to soften her to his will, which was to live. And in the plane on the return flight, he had turned the screws on her even tighter by lying to her over and over until she had made the decision he had wanted her to make all along: abandon her mission.
But she was not so easily duped. She was in far more control of her emotions than he could know. There was a job to do, she could see it so clearly now, see through all the bullshit men threw at her as smokescreens. At last, she had seen the path through the bullshit to, once and for all, make her way to the other side.
Always imprisoned.
She stepped over the threshold and entered Don Fernando’s bedroom. He lay on his back on the side of the bed nearest her, veiled in deep shadow. Moving to the window, she pulled back the drapes. His patrician face was illuminated by Paris’s mellow glow. Returning to him, she reached out, touched him on the shoulder, and he gave a snort and rolled over on his side, facing away from her. Perfect.
She lifted the strangler’s filament, concentrating solely on her purpose. When her vision narrowed to a pinpoint, when all she could hear was the rhythmic beating of her heart, purpose became action.
She moved with perfect, deadly intent.
23
THE MOMENT DR. SANTIAGO removed the drain from the side of her head and bandaged the wound, Soraya felt as if she had returned from the gray land of near-death to a world full of color and promise.
Everything looked sharp-edged. Her acuity of vision and hearing was like that of a hawk. Every surface she ran her hand over felt new, different, and exciting.
When she remarked on this to Dr. Santiago, he broke out into a wide smile. “Welcome back,” he said.
For the first time since she had been admitted, she was free, untethered by lifelines to fluids and monitors. She moved around her room on legs made unfamiliar and shaky by her ordeal.
“Look at you,” Delia said. “Look at you!”
Soraya embraced her friend, held her tight, aware of the baby between them. She did not want to let go. Brushing tears away, she kissed Delia on both cheeks. Her heart was full.
Only one thought clouded her return from the back of beyond. “Deel, I need to go see Peter. Will you help me?”
Without another word, Delia went and got a wheelchair into which Soraya lowered herself. Hours before, on his last visit, Hendricks had told her that Peter had been shot. “We don’t know how badly yet,” he had said, “but I want you to be prepared. The bullet lodged near his spine.” “Does he know?” she had asked. Hendricks had nodded. “Right now he has no feeling in his legs.”
Before he left, Hendricks had signaled to Delia, and they had walked out of Soraya’s room together. Now, as Delia pushed her along the hospital’s hushed corridors, Soraya asked, “What did you and Hendricks talk about outside my hearing?”
There was a telling hesitation. “Raya, concentrate on Peter. I don’t think this is the time—”
Soraya put her hands on the wheels, stopping them. “Deel, come around where I can see you.” When her friend had complied, she said, “Tell me the truth, Deel. Does it have something to do with my baby?”
“Oh, no!” Delia cried. She knelt in front of Soraya and took her hands in hers. “No, no, no, the baby’s fine. It’s...” Again the telling hesitation. “Raya, Charles is dead.”
Soraya felt the shock of disappointment, nothing more. “What?”
“Ann shot him.”
Soraya shook her head. “I don’t...I don’t understand.”
“There was an altercation. Charles came at her and she defended herself. That’s not the official story. He was shot during a B and E, that’s what the news outlets are being fed.”
Soraya said nothing for some time. Nurses squeaked by on rubbersoled shoes, phones rang softly, doctors’ names were called, some urgently. Everything else was still.
“I don’t believe it,” Soraya breathed.
Delia searched her friend’s face. “Raya, are you okay? The secretary left it up to me to tell you, but I don’t know whether this was the right time.”
“There is no right time,” Soraya said. “There’s only the present.”
Searching through the corridors of her mind, she could find no feeling for Charles Thorne other than disappointment that their business relationship was at an end. Conduits weren’t easy to find, especially one so perfectly placed at the center of the information superhighway. But, on the other hand, if Charles was right about the impending investigation, his usefulness would have been at an end anyway. What she felt most was relief. It had been distasteful to her to lie to him about the baby. She could absolve herself, at least, of that sin. “Raya, what are you thinking?”
Soraya nodded to Delia. “Let’s go see Peter.”
He had been out of surgery for over an hour and he was awake. He seemed happy to see them.
“Hey, Peter,” Soraya said in an overbright voice. He looked ghostly, arms pale, pierced by needles whose tubes ran up and out of him. His face was contorted by pain though he tried his best to hide it. His lopsided smile broke her heart.
“You look good,” he said.