She wore a basque of white lace which contained her torso by something close to a miracle and seemed to narrow impossibly from the dazzling generosity of its cups to the severe restriction of its waist. She wore white stockings which disdained any support other than that their tops clutched the marble swell of her upper thighs. She wore shoes with high heels, their toes made of the same dark velvet as the dress which she had just removed. And she wore her jewels, the square-cut garnets set in gold at her throat and round her wrists.
Behind her, framing her, glimmered a room designed to match her and the fantasies she walked out of. There were little sidelights covered in exotic cloths and tall candles with flames glittering like diamonds. There were dark curtains, long pier glasses and a brass four-poster bed liberally piled with silk and satin pillows. Paul took all this in with one dazed glance before his eyes returned to her, pulled by a force of nature beyond his control.
It was not so much the nakedness of the rest of her that gripped him — though the nudity was quite glorious — as its sculpted perfection. There was precious little fat beneath the white skin before him. This was not the body of a soft office worker but of a trained athlete, and when she moved now, it was with the unconscious grace of a gymnast or a ballerina.
Where she had discovered such a fund of self-confidence he would never know, but every trace of shyness had departed with her clothes. She took charge of him now, pulling him easily to his feet and supporting him through the double doors into her bedroom as though he weighed nothing at all. And every plane of her cool skin seemed to burn paradoxically through his clothing as they moved together so that it was as though there was nothing between the two of them at all. She sat him on the edge of the bed with his damaged leg supported on the firm mattress, then crossed to the door again with seemingly very little purpose other than to pull the wings of wood together and lean back against them while he feasted his eyes anew.
‘I wanted,’ he began, breathlessly, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘I wanted to do that. To take… To remove …’
‘No,’ she purred, looking across the table at him, ‘there was no need. It’s all right.’
She was in motion again, coming closer, reaching for him, her fingers busy as she removed his jacket and shirt; flowing down to her right knee and placing each of his feet upon her left thigh as she unlaced each shoe. Peeled off each sock. So it was the sensitive pads of his toes that first came into intimate contact with the cool solidity and burning softness of her.
Trousers and shorts came off together, a lengthy and painful process complicated by his excitement. At last she pressed him back into the hillock of pillows at the head of the bed and swung herself up between his legs. Fractionally she hesitated, looking down at him slightly, her eyes just above his. Then she turned lightly and sat back, her pale buttocks between his thighs, her back fitting thrillingly into the curve of his belly and chest. Her position placed the golden helmet of her hair just beneath his chin. ‘There,’ she whispered throatily, comfortably. ‘You wanted to take my clothing off. You may let my hair down instead.’
The release of her Rapunzel locks seemed to release something more inside her. Something at once dominant and subservient, demanding yet tender, wild yet thoughtful. He had brought protection. So had she. They threatened to run out, even so. After the first wild rush, they slowed and varied their positions so that his thigh would be protected from the strenuous heights of their passion. As they began to explore the gentler foothills, with just a bottle of Krug champagne to sustain them, his thigh began to gain in importance, for the itching he had felt on the side of his leg intensified. No doubt their exertions had covered this part of him, as well as the rest of him, in a liberal sprinkling of perspiration. The candles had burned low now, but they gave off heat as well as light. The radiators as well as the sidelights remained on and the temperature in the room was very nearly tropical. At last he broke away from her, hissing in ill-controlled agony.
‘What is it?’ she asked, all concern at once.
‘The leg. I can’t stand it any longer!’
‘What is wrong with it?’
‘I don’t know. It just burns! God! How it itches!’
‘Shall I take a look at it?’
‘Don’t tell me you’re a nurse too!’
‘No, but I will be able to tell if you need to go to the casualty, yes? If the wound is infected or tearing. This will be obvious, I think.’
‘Yes. All right. Please. But be careful, please.’
‘Of course.’
She pulled herself away and vanished. Moments later she was back with several pairs of scissors, disinfectant, dressings and clean elastic bandaging such as might be found in any well-stocked medicine cupboard. She turned on the main light so that she could see what she was doing and some of the wild romance left with the velvet shadows. She sat beside him, all efficiency and practical concern. Using the largest pair of kitchen scissors first, then smaller and smaller pairs in turn, she removed the bandage until the wound was revealed.
Just uncovering the flesh brought Paul some measure of relief and, exhausted, he felt himself sinking into the soft pillows as though they were quicksand, and consciousness began to fade away.
For Inga Kroll, the opposite was true. The last layer of gauze revealed a thigh almost as muscular as her own, covered in lightly furred ivory skin. Down the outside, from the hip nearly to the knee, ran a thin wound held closed by a combination of stitches and thin lateral bandages. The wound itself showed no sign of infection or any suggestion that their lovemaking had strained it in any way. But the flesh all round it, in a long rectangle, straight-edged and square, was red and irritated, almost as if it had been burned. And, strangest of all, down the middle of the red-burned rectangle of skin ran a series of white blisters. Some had burst, some had been cut open by the surgery so that the sinuous line they might have made was no longer continuous but was pitted with raw wounds which were obviously the source of Paul’s discomfort. But there was a pattern which was still quite clear. Shockingly so.
The strange white blisters spelt out several letters in mirror-writing. In Cyrillic, Russian, writing. She could read it with very little difficulty: ‘Leoni’.
What did it mean? How could it have come to be there?
Inga had heard a certain amount about the bizarre side effects of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it was part of her Soviet-inspired education in the East German city of Dresden. She was aware that some victims on the outskirts of the cities and on the slopes overlooking them had been found with the letters from the newspapers they had been reading at the moment of explosion burned into their faces. So she knew something about the ability of black on a white background to soak up far more radiation during nuclear explosion, but she knew nothing at all about any nuclear explosion that Paul could have been involved in, or any nuclear explosion that might have involved something with the word ‘Leoni’ written on it.
But it was so striking, she thought she had better report it the next time she passed a message back to her masters in the one section of the STASI which was still operational, and they in turn would report it to their masters in Dzerzhinsky Street.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dr Asha Higgins had led a varied and exciting life. She had been born the elder of twin girls by less than five minutes, the daughter of a Kuwaiti prince. She had been brought up as a princess in an exclusive English boarding school. She had studied to be a doctor while her sister Fatima studied journalism. She had married and divorced one of Fatima’s friends, the journalist Giles Quartermaine. She had worked for many years as ship’s doctor with the Heritage Mariner organisation and met her second husband, John, when they had been kidnapped with his whole command, pirated by terrorists in the Gulf.
But of all the things she had done and been expected to do during the last five years, this was by far the worst. She clipped on her safety line and heaved herself up out of the pitching little dinghy onto the Jacob’s ladder which swung and flapped up Titan’s massive side. Crossing a viciously choppy sea still foaming from the death of a blazing helicopter and its brave pilot and heaving herself up the better part of twenty metres of sheer black metal counted as nothing. Being called to certify the death of her husband’s closest friend, her own good friend and husband of her own closest friend was a bitter thing indeed. Wally Gough, the ship’s cadet, was there at the top of the ladder to haul Asha aboard and hand her the medical bag which had been pulled aboard separately. ‘Where is he?’ she yelled. And she did have to yell. Up here the wind was very nearly storm force and it was armed with lethal whips of sand. Even though Manhattan was far behind, she could hear the power of the harmattan in the superstructure, the wailing hiss of the sharp Saharan sand, and the massive booming bluster of the gale against the distant icy cliffs.
‘Down here!’ yelled Wally and, although they had told her it was too late, she ran down the deck to Richard’s inert body and the tall Irish first officer — captain now, if they were right about Richard — kneeling by his side. There was quite a crowd of crew men down here as well, all gathered anxiously, protectively, round Richard’s body.
Asha shouldered through them roughly. Watching herself, studying her actions from that distance which shock can engender, she was surprised by the violence of her actions and at the same time recognised it as a reaction to the depth of her personal pain.
Richard was lying on his back, facing up as though fascinated by the low hazy scud of sand clouds. At least his eyes were closed. That was fortunate because the sand was falling out of the wind at an incredible rate and already the long still body was being shrouded in miniature dunes. It was a trick of the wind, however — one which they would soon come to recognise as being typical of its vicious character — that the only part of the deck near the body innocent of sand was in the wind shadow of Richard’s head, where a thick pool of blood lay.
‘Has anyone moved him at all?’ bellowed Asha, thudding painfully onto her knees at his side.
‘Only as far as we needed, in order to check his pulse and perform the standard resuscitation,’ answered Sally. She was pumping powerfully on Richard’s chest. ‘Fifteen,’ she said, apparently apropos of nothing. Then she leaned over and breathed into Richard’s mouth.
Asha began to check for herself while Sally continued to pump Richard’s chest, and her sensitive fingertips warned her that Sally might well be right. To be fair, she would have expected nothing else from a Heritage Mariner first officer — they were all fully trained to be acting medics. A doctor aboard was a luxury normally only granted to Prometheus, John’s usual command, the flagship of the fleet. Deep concentration and sensitive exploration of low-fluttering life forces was almost impossible here in the teeth of this foul, vicious wind, but Asha thought that, deep in the muscle-twined column of the neck, something was stirring in Richard after all. ‘We’re going to have to move him,’ she decided at last. ‘I need a stretcher here. Now!’
A stretcher arrived surprisingly quickly and was slammed down onto the deck beside her as roughly as she had shouldered her way through the circle of onlookers. Sally and she were clearly not the only people aboard who held Richard Mariner in deep affection. But none of the roughness was apparent in the way they gathered Richard’s inert form, folding his arms carefully across the barrel of his chest and cradling his still-bleeding head, and lifted it aboard the sandy stretcher. Equally gently, they strapped him in place and packed pillows round his head and neck.
Six men caught up the stretcher and ran it back up the deck with Asha, Wally and Sally in close pursuit. Skidding over the gathering sand dunes, they swung in through the bulkhead door into the A deck corridor. Still running at a trot, like a squad of marines, they went along the corridor until they reached the door to the ship’s sickbay. Here at last they stopped to let their commander and the doctor through first. Then they, too, entered and laid Richard’s body on the nearest of the beds. They stayed, anxiously, where they were until Asha ordered them out. Sally Bell’s eyebrow, raised when they hesitated, added irresistible weight to the command. Wally went with them, obviously regretfully.
The two women began to unpack Richard’s head and neck with great care. The frame of the stretcher came easily apart and the metal tubes were pulled out of the fabric so that the injured — dead — man was left simply lying on the bed. Then Sally was called up onto the bridge once more, and Asha, desolate, continued on her own.
Richard and she were old friends and she thought she knew every detail about him except those which were absolutely private between him and his wife Robin. She knew what had caused his aquiline nose to be broken slightly out of true. She knew why one of his fingers was shorter than the rest. She thought she knew the bulk of his medical history, but the moment she undid the buttons of his boiler suit and began to expose his upper thorax to the light, she stopped and reached for his medical notes once more. She had several pages to scan quickly, with frowning concentration, before she took the cold disc of her stethoscope and pressed it to the left side of his still chest. It was no wonder, she thought grimly, that his heartbeat was so hard to find. His right lower thorax was ridged with scar tissue. She moved the stethoscope up almost to his armpit, thrusting it mercilessly beneath the solid slab of his pectoral muscle.
She did not clearly hear a heartbeat, but she did hear just the faintest whisper of respiration.
Her long, golden, almond-shaped eyes flooded with tears of relief. She moved across the ravaged wasteland of that great barrel chest and yes, there at last, was a heartbeat. Slow and regular and blessedly strong. Automatically she crossed to her medical bag and began to get out the thermometer, the reflexometer, the blood-pressure gauge and all the other equipment she would need for the battery of tests she wanted to complete now that she knew there was a point in completing them. Then she stopped, turned and crossed to die telephone which hung on the wall by the door. She lifted the handset and dialled.
‘Bridge here,’ came Sally’s unmistakable tones at once.
‘He’s … he’s alive,’ said Asha.