He inhaled slowly, noiselessly. His heart hammered; his body tensed. Then the trunk was slammed and the car moved forward.
Out of the vehicle trap. Into the courtyard.
Baumann could taste the exhaust fumes and hoped he would not have to remain here much longer. A moment later, the car again came to a halt. He knew they had arrived at the prison gates, where another cursory inspection would be done. Then the car moved on again, soon accelerating as it merged with the main road to Cape Town.
Clever though he was, Baumann knew he could not have orchestrated his escape without the help of the powerful man in Switzerland who for some reason had taken a keen interest in his liberty.
The car’s driver, a young man named van Loon, was an accountant in the office of the prison commandant as well as a friend of the chaplain’s. The young accountant had volunteered to pick up the chaplain, who was arriving on a Trek Airways flight from Johannesburg to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town, in the chaplain’s own newly repaired car.
By prior arrangement with Baumann, however, van Loon would find it necessary to make a brief stop at a petrol station along the way for refueling and a cup of coffee. There, in a secluded rest stop out of sight of passersby, Baumann would get out.
The plan had worked perfectly.
He was free, but his elation was dampened somewhat by the unpleasantness with the warder in the auto shop. It was unfortunate he had had to kill the simple fellow.
He had rather liked Keevy.
CHAPTER TWO
Several hours earlier, at eight o’clock on a rainy evening in Boston, a young blond woman strode brusquely across the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel and toward the bank of elevators.
The set of her pretty face was all business, her eyebrows arched, her lips slightly pursed. She wore the uniform of an affluent businesswoman: a navy-blue double-breasted Adrienne Vittadini suit with padded shoulders, an Hermès scarf, an off-white silk blouse, a simple strand of pearls and matching mabe pearl earrings, black Ferragamo pumps, and, under one arm, a slim cordovan Gucci portfolio. In the other hand-somewhat incongruously-she grasped a large black leather bag.
To the casual observer, the woman might have been a high-powered attorney or an executive returning from a dinner with clients. But a more thorough inspection would have revealed tiny details that punctured the illusion. Perhaps it was her too obviously dyed, shoulder-length ash-blond hair. Perhaps her restless blue eyes, which betrayed a discomfort with the hotel’s modern glass-and-marble opulence.
Whatever it was that didn’t fit, the concierge glanced up at her, back down to the petty-cash-disbursement sheet before him, then back again to the beautiful blond woman for the briefest instant. Then he inclined his head slightly to one side and caught the eye of one of the hotel’s security people, a woman who sat in a large comfortable armchair feigning to read The Boston Globe.
Security arched her eyebrows a fraction to signal that she, too, was suspicious-or at least amused-then smiled and gave the tiniest shrug, invisible to anyone but the concierge, which said, Let her go, we can’t be entirely sure.
The Four Seasons did all it could to discourage call girls, but in uncertain cases such as this, it was far better to err on the permissive side rather than risk offending a legitimate hotel guest.
The blond woman entered a waiting elevator and got out on the seventh floor. When she reached room 722, she let herself in with a key.
About twenty minutes later, a well-dressed man in his mid-fifties unlocked the same door. Although he was not an especially handsome man-he had a high, speckled forehead, beaky nose, large pouches under his eyes, fleshy jowls-there was about him the patina of prosperity.
His face and hands were deeply tanned, as if he often sailed the waters off St. Bart’s, which he did. His hair was silver and neatly combed. His navy blazer was well tailored and expensive, his tie from Ermenegildo Zegna, his tasseled loafers polished to a high sheen.
Entering the room tentatively, he glanced around, but the only evidence of the woman was the clothes hanging neatly in the closet. The bathroom door was closed. He tingled with enormous anticipation.
In the exact center of the king-size bed an envelope had been placed. He reached across the bed and retrieved it. On its front was his name in large, loopy script. The note inside contained a simple set of instructions, which he read and immediately began to follow.
With trembling, clumsy fingers, he placed his briefcase on a desk and started undressing, dropping his jacket and then his pants in crumpled heaps on the gray carpet beside the bed. Fumblingly, he unbuttoned his shirt and then slipped off his monogrammed silk boxer shorts. He stumbled twice trying to remove his socks. Momentarily alarmed, he looked up to make sure the drapes were drawn. They were. She had, of course, taken care of every detail.
As he knelt in the corner of the room, naked, he felt his half-swollen member throb fully, almost painfully, to life, arching away from his body, proud and distended and flushed.
He heard the bathroom door open.
When the woman emerged, he did not turn to look: he had been ordered not to do so. In her black patent-leather boots with heels, the blond woman was just under six feet tall. Her body was covered entirely in a skin-tight black cat suit of four-way-stretch PVC, a wet-looking material made of a plastic substance bonded to Lycra. Her black gloves went to her elbows; the mask over her eyes was of thin black leather.
Silently, with fluid movements, she approached him from behind and placed a blindfold on him, the soft sheepskin against his eyes, the supple leather on the outside, its closure made of elastic. It looked like an oversize pair of goggles.
As she fastened the blindfold, she touched him gently, caressed him, wordlessly reassured. She placed a gloved hand under each arm, lifted him to his feet, and guided him over to the bed, where he knelt again, his engorged phallus compressed tightly between his abdomen and the side of the bed.
Next, she placed handcuffs on his wrists and clicked them shut. For the first time, she spoke. “It’s time for your hood,” she said in a husky contralto.
He inhaled deeply and quaveringly. His shoulders hunched with anticipation. He could sense her towering over him, could smell her leather gloves and boots.
She removed his blindfold, and now he was able to look at her. “Yes, mistress,” he said in a soft, childlike whisper.
The hood was made of leather, too, form-fitting and lined with rubber. It had no holes for eyes or mouth, only nose holes for breathing. His eyes widened in fear as he took in the severity of this piece of apparatus. She slipped it over his head, heavy and cold and stifling, and he trembled with mixed terror and excitement.
She pulled the hood’s collar tight, adjusted it, pulled the zipper down at the back, and fastened the zipper’s tag end to the collar with a loud click.
The man was now overwhelmed with delicious fear. An icy, sickening terror lodged itself in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to vomit, but was afraid to do so, for it would suffocate him.
He felt his breath catch somewhere deep in his throat, just above the lungs. He gulped, gasped for air, forgetting for an instant that in this hood the only way he could breathe was through his nose, and he panicked.
He whimpered, trying to scream, but unable to.
“You’ve been bad,” he heard her admonish him. “I like looking at you, but you’ve been a bad boy.”
Control your breathing! he told himself. Regular, rhythmic! Through the nose-breathe! But the panic was too powerful; it overwhelmed his feeble efforts to take control of his body. He gulped for air, but his mouth tasted only the rubber, now warm and damp. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his face in the darkness, and trickled, hot and salty, into his gasping mouth. Even when he somehow managed to compel himself to breathe through his nose, snorting in stingy, leather-smelling nosefuls of air, he knew he remained on the very precipice of losing control entirely.