Текст книги "Eye of the Needle"

Автор книги: Ken Follett

Соавторы: Ken Follett
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“What made you come here?”

“Um.” She sat down, sipped her drink, and looked into the fire.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t—”

“It’s all right. We had an accident the day we got married. That’s how David lost his legs. He’d been training as a fighter pilot…we both wanted to run away, I think. I believe it was a mistake, but, as they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“It’s a reason for a healthy man to feel resentment.”

She gave him a sharp look. “You’re a perceptive man.”

“It’s obvious.” He spoke very quietly. “So is your unhappiness.”

She blinked nervously. “You see too much.”

“It’s not difficult. Why do you continue, if it’s not working?”

“I don’t know quite what to tell you”—or herself, for talking so openly to him. “Do you want clichés? The way he was before…the vows of marriage…the child…the war…If there’s another answer, I can’t find good words for it.”

“Maybe guilt,” Faber said. “But you’re thinking of leaving him, aren’t you?”

She stared at him, slowly shaking her head. “How do you know so much?”

“You’ve lost the art of dissembling in four years on this island. Besides, these things are so much simpler from the outside.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“No. That’s what I mean.”

“Why not?…I think you ought to be.”

It was Faber’s turn to look away, into the fire. Why not, indeed? His stock answer—to himself—was his profession. But of course he could not tell her that, and anyway it was too glib. “I don’t trust myself to love anyone that much.” The words had come out without forethought—he was astonished to note—and he wondered whether they were true. A moment later he wondered how Lucy had got past his guard, when he had thought he was disarming her.

Neither of them spoke for a while. The fire was dying. A few stray raindrops found their way down the chimney and hissed in the cooling coals. The storm showed no sign of letting up. Faber found himself thinking of the last woman he had had. What was her name? Gertrud. It was seven years ago, but he could picture her now in the flickering fire: a round German face, fair hair, green eyes, beautiful breasts, much-too-wide hips, fat legs, bad feet; the conversational style of an express train, a wild, inexhaustible enthusiasm for sex…. She had flattered him, admiring his mind (she said) and adoring his body (she had no need to tell him). She wrote lyrics for popular songs, and read them to him in a poor basement flat in Berlin; it was not a lucrative profession. He visualized her now in that untidy bedroom, lying naked, urging him to do more bizarre and erotic things with her, to hurt her, to touch himself, to lie completely still while she made love to him…. He shook his head slightly to brush away the memories. He had not thought like that in all the years he had been celibate. Such visions were disturbing. He looked at Lucy.

“You were far away,” she said with a smile.

“Memories,” he said. “This talk of love…”

“I shouldn’t burden you.”

“You’re not.”

“Good memories?”

“Very good. And yours? You were thinking too.”

She smiled again. “I was in the future, not the past.”

“What do you see there?”

She seemed about to answer, then changed her mind. It happened twice. There were signs of tension about her eyes.

“I see you finding another man,” Faber said. As he spoke he was thinking, Why am I doing this? “He is a weaker man than David, and less handsome, but it’s at least partly for his weakness that you love him. He’s clever, but not rich; compassionate without being sentimental; tender, loving—”

The brandy glass in her hand shattered under the pressure of her grip. The fragments fell into her lap and onto the carpet, and she ignored them. Faber crossed to her chair and knelt in front of her. Her thumb was bleeding. He took her hand.

“You’ve hurt yourself.”

She looked at him. She was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The cut was superficial. She took a handkerchief from her trousers pocket and staunched the blood. Faber released her hand and began to pick up the pieces of broken glass, wishing he had kissed her when he’d had the chance. He put the shards on the mantel.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. (Didn’t he?)

She took away the handkerchief and looked at her thumb. It was still bleeding. (Yes, you did. And, God knows, you have.)

“A bandage,” he suggested.

“In the kitchen.”

He found a roll of bandage, a pair of scissors, and a safety pin. He filled a small bowl with hot water and returned to the living room.

In his absence she had somehow obliterated the evidence of tears on her face. She sat passively, limp, while he bathed her thumb in the hot water, dried it, and put a small strip of bandage over the cut. She looked all the time at his face, not at his hands; but her expression was unreadable.

He finished the job and stood back abruptly. This was silly: he had taken the thing too far. Time to disengage. “I think I’d better go to bed,” he said.

She nodded.

“I’m sorry—”

“Stop apologizing,” she told him. “It doesn’t suit you.”

Her tone was harsh. He guessed that she, too, felt the thing had got out of hand.

“Are you staying up?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Well…” He followed her through the hall and up the stairs, and he watched her climb, her hips moving gently.

At the top of the stairs, on the tiny landing, she turned and said in a low voice, “Good night.”

“Good night, Lucy.”

She looked at him for a moment. He reached for her hand, but she turned quickly away, entering her bedroom and closing the door without a backward look, leaving him standing there, wondering what was in her mind and—more to the point—what was really in his.

22

BLOGGS DROVE DANGEROUSLY FAST THROUGH THE night in a commandeered Sunbeam Talbot with a souped-up engine. The hilly, winding Scottish roads were slick with rain and, in a few low places, two or three inches deep in water. The rain drove across the windshield in sheets. On the more exposed hilltops the gale-force winds threatened to blow the car off the road and into the soggy turf alongside. For mile after mile, Bloggs sat forward in the seat, peering through the small area of glass that was cleared by the wiper, straining his eyes to make out the shape of the road in front as the headlights battled with the obscuring rain. Just north of Edinburgh he ran over three rabbits, feeling the sickening bump as the tires squashed their small bodies. He did not slow the car, but for a while afterward he wondered whether rabbits normally came out at night.

The strain gave him a headache, and his sitting position made his back hurt. He also felt hungry. He opened the window for a cold breeze to keep him awake, but so much water came in that he was immediately forced to close it again. He thought about Die Nadel, or Faber or whatever he was calling himself now: a smiling young man in running shorts, holding a trophy. Well, so far Faber was winning this race. He was forty-eight hours ahead and he had the advantage that only he knew the route that had to be followed. Bloggs would have enjoyed a contest with that man, if the stakes had not been so high, so bloody high.

He wondered what he would do if he ever came face to face with the man. I’d shoot him out of hand, he thought, before he killed me. Faber was a pro, and you didn’t mess with that type. Most spies were amateurs: frustrated revolutionaries of the left or right, people who wanted the imaginary glamour of espionage, greedy men or lovesick women or blackmail victims. The few professionals were very dangerous indeed; they were not merciful men.

Dawn was still an hour or two away when Bloggs drove into Aberdeen. Never in his life had he been so grateful for street lights, dimmed and masked though they were. He had no idea where the police station was, and there was no one on the streets to give him direction so he drove around the town until he saw the familiar blue lamp (also dimmed).

He parked the car and ran through the rain into the building. He was expected. Godliman had been on the phone, and Godliman was now very senior indeed. Bloggs was shown into the office of Alan Kincaid, a detective-chief-inspector in his mid-fifties. There were three other officers in the room; Bloggs shook their hands and instantly forgot their names.

Kincaid said: “You made bloody good time from Carlisle.”

“Nearly killed myself doing it,” Bloggs replied, and sat down. “If you can rustle up a sandwich…”

“Of course.” Kincaid leaned his head out of the door and shouted something. “It’ll be here in two shakes,” he told Bloggs.

The office had off-white walls, a plank floor, and plain hard furniture: a desk, a few chairs and a filing cabinet. It was totally unrelieved: no pictures, no ornaments, no personal touches of any kind. There was a tray of dirty cups on the floor, and the air was thick with smoke. It smelled like a place where men had been working all night.

Kincaid had a small moustache, thin grey hair and spectacles. A big intelligent-looking man in shirtsleeves and braces, he spoke with a local accent, a sign that, like Bloggs, he had come up through the ranks—though from his age it was clear that his rise had been slower than Bloggs’s.

Bloggs said: “How much do you know about all this?”

“Not much,” Kincaid said. “But your governor, Godliman, did say that the London murders are the least of this man’s crimes. We also know which department you’re with, so we can put two and two together about this Faber…”

“What have you done so far?” Bloggs asked.

Kincaid put his feet on his desk. “He arrived here two days ago, right? That was when we started looking for him. We had the pictures—I assume every force in the country got them.”

“Yes.”

“We checked the hotels and lodging houses, the station and the bus depot. We did it quite thoroughly, although at the time we didn’t know he had come here. Needless to say, we had no results. We’re checking again, of course; but my opinion is that he probably left Aberdeen immediately.”

A woman police constable came in with a cup of tea and a very thick cheese sandwich. Bloggs thanked her and greedily set about the sandwich.

Kincaid went on: “We had a man at the railway station before the first train left in the morning. Same for the bus depot. So, if he left the town, either he stole a car or he hitched a ride. We’ve had no stolen cars reported, so I figure he hitched—”

“He might have gone by sea,” Bloggs said through a mouthful of wholemeal bread.

“Of the boats that left the harbor that day, none was big enough to stow away on. Since then, of course, nothing’s gone out because of the storm.”

“Stolen boats?”

“None reported.”

Bloggs shrugged. “If there’s no prospect of going out, the owners might not come to the harbor—in which case the theft of a boat might go unnoticed until the storm ends.”

One of the officers in the room said, “We missed that one, chief.”

“We did,” Kincaid said.

“Perhaps the harbormaster could look around all the regular moorings,” Bloggs suggested.

“I’m with you,” Kincaid said. He was already dialing. After a moment he spoke into the phone. “Captain Douglas? Kincaid. Aye, I know civilized people sleep at this hour. You haven’t heard the worst—I want you to take a walk in the rain. Aye, you heard me right…” Kincaid put his hand over the mouthpiece. “You know what they say about seamen’s language? It’s true.” He spoke into the phone again. “Go round all the regular moorings and make a note of any vessels not in their usual spot. Ignoring those you know to be legitimately out of port, give me the names and addresses—and phone numbers if you have them—of the owners. Aye. Aye, I know…I’ll make it a double. All right, a bottle. And a good morning to you too, old friend.” He hung up.

Bloggs smiled. “Salty?”

“If I did what he suggested I do with my truncheon, I’d never be able to sit down again.” Kincaid became serious. “It’ll take him about half an hour, then we’ll need a couple of hours to check all the addresses. It’s worth doing, although I still think he hitched a ride.”

“So do I,” Bloggs said.

The door opened and a middle-aged man in civilian clothes walked in. Kincaid and his officers stood up, and Bloggs followed.

Kincaid said, “Good morning, sir. This is Mr. Bloggs. Mr. Bloggs, Richard Porter.”

They shook hands. Porter had a red face and a carefully cultivated moustache. He wore a double-breasted, camel-colored overcoat. “How do you do. I’m the blighter that gave your chappie a lift to Aberdeen. Most embarrassing.” He had no local accent.

Bloggs said, “How do you do.” On first acquaintance Porter seemed to be exactly the kind of silly ass who would give a spy a lift half across the country. However, Bloggs realized the air of empty-headed heartiness might also mask a shrewd mind. He tried to be tolerant—he, too, had made embarrassing mistakes in the last few hours.

“I heard about the abandoned Morris. I picked him up at that very spot.”

“You’ve seen the picture?”

“Yes. Of course, I didn’t get a good look at the chappie, because it was dark for most of the journey. But I saw enough of him, in the light of the flashlight when we were under the hood, and afterward when we entered Aberdeen—it was dawn by then. If I’d only seen the picture, I’d say it could have been him. Given the spot at which I picked him up, so near to where the Morris was found, I say it was him.”

“I agree,” Bloggs said. He thought for a moment, wondering what useful information he could get out of this man. “How did Faber impress you?”

Porter said promptly: “He struck me as exhausted, nervous and determined, in that order. Also, he was no Scotsman.”

“How would you describe his accent?”

“Neutral. The accent—minor public school, Home Counties. Jarred with his clothes, if you know what I mean. He was wearing overalls. Another thing I didn’t remark until afterwards.”

Kincaid interrupted to offer tea. Everyone accepted. The policeman went to the door.

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, nothing much.”

“But you were together for hours—”

“He slept most of the way. He mended the car—it was only a disconnected lead, but I’m afraid I’m helpless with machines—then he told me his own car had broken down in Edinburgh and he was going to Banff. Said he didn’t really want to go through Aberdeen, as he didn’t have a Restricted Area Pass. I’m afraid I…I told him not to worry about that. Said I’d vouch for him if we were stopped. Makes one feel such a bloody fool, you know—but I felt I owed him a favor. He had got me out of a bit of a hole, y’know.”

“Nobody’s blaming you, sir,” Kincaid said.

Bloggs was, but he didn’t say so. Instead, “There are very few people who have met Faber and can tell us what he’s like. Can you think hard and tell me what kind of a man you took him to be?”

“He woke up like a soldier,” Porter said. “He was courteous, and seemed intelligent. Firm handshake. I take notice of handshakes.”

“Anything else?”

“Something else about when he woke up…” Porter’s florid face creased up in a frown. “His right hand went to his left forearm, like this.” He demonstrated.

“That’s something,” Bloggs said. “That’ll be where he keeps the knife. A sleeve-sheath.”

“Nothing else, I’m afraid.”

“And he said he was going to Banff. That means he’s not. I wager you told him where you were going before he told you where he was going.”

“I believe I did.” Porter nodded. “Well, well.”

“Either Aberdeen was his destination, or he went south after you dropped him. Since he said he was going north, he probably didn’t.”

“That kind of second-guessing could get out of hand,” Kincaid said.

“Sometimes it does”—Kincaid was definitely no fool—“did you tell him that you’re a magistrate?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why he didn’t kill you.”

“What? Good Lord!”

“He knew you’d be missed.”

The door opened again. The man who walked in said, “I’ve got your information, and I hope it was fuckin’ worth it.”

Bloggs grinned. This was, undoubtedly, the harbormaster—a short man with cropped white hair, smoking a large pipe and wearing a blazer with brass buttons.

Kincaid said, “Come in, captain. How did you get so wet? You shouldn’t go out in the rain.”

“Fuck off,” the captain said, bringing delighted expressions to the other faces in the room.

Porter said, “Morning, captain.”

“Good morning, Your Worship.”

Kincaid said, “What have you got?”

The captain took off his cap and shook drops of rain from its crown. “The Marie II has gone missing,” he said. “I saw her come in on the afternoon the storm began. I didn’t see her go out, but I know she shouldn’t have sailed again that day. However, it seems she did.”

“Who owns her?”

“Tam Halfpenny. I telephoned him. He left her in her mooring that day and hasn’t seen her since.”

“What kind of vessel is she?” Bloggs asked.

“A small fishing boat, sixty feet and broad in the beam. Stout little craft. Inboard motor. No particular style—the fishermen round here don’t follow the pattern book when they build boats.”

“Let me ask you,” Bloggs said. “Could that boat have survived the storm?”

The captain paused in the act of putting a match to his pipe. “With a very skillful sailor at the helm—maybe. Maybe not.”

“How far might he have got before the storm broke?”

“Not far—a few miles. The Marie II was not tied up until evening.”

Bloggs stood up, walked around his chair and sat down again. “So where is he now?”

“At the bottom of the sea, in all probability, the bloody fool.” The captain’s statement was not without relish.

Bloggs could take no satisfaction in the likelihood that Faber was dead. It was too inconclusive. The discontent spread to his body, and he felt restless, itchy. Frustrated. He scratched his chin—he needed a shave. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.

“You won’t.”

“Please save your guesswork,” Bloggs said. “We want your information, not pessimism.” The other men in the room suddenly remembered that, despite his youth, he was the senior officer there. “Let’s, if you don’t mind, review the possibilities. One: he left Aberdeen by land and someone else stole the Marie II. In that case he has probably reached his destination by now, but he won’t have left the country because of the storm. We already have all the other police forces looking for him, and that’s all we can do about number one.

“Two: he’s still in Aberdeen. Again, we have this possibility covered; we’re still looking for him.

“Three: he left Aberdeen by sea. I think we’re agreed this is the strongest option. Let’s break it down. Three A: he found shelter somewhere, or cracked up somewhere—mainland or island. Three B: he died.” He did not, of course, mention three C: he transferred to another vessel—probably a U-boat—before the storm broke…he probably didn’t have time, but he might’ve. And if he caught a U-boat, we’ve had it, so might as well forget that one.

“If he found shelter,” Bloggs went on, “or was shipwrecked, we’ll find evidence sooner or later—either the Marie II, or pieces of it. We can search the coastline right away and survey the sea as soon as the weather clears sufficiently for us to get a plane up. If he’s gone to the bottom of the ocean we may still find bits of the boat floating.

“So we have three courses of action to take. We continue the searches already going on; we mount a new search of the coastline, working north and south from Aberdeen; and we prepare for an air-sea search the minute the weather improves.”

Bloggs had begun to pace up and down as he spoke. He stopped now and looked around. “Comments?”

The late hour had got to all of them. Bloggs’s sudden access of energy jerked them out of a creeping lethargy. One leaned forward, rubbing his hands; another tied his shoelaces; a third put his jacket on. They wanted to go to work. There were no comments, no questions.

23

FABER WAS AWAKE. HIS BODY PROBABLY NEEDED sleep despite the fact that he had spent the day in bed; but his mind was hyperactive, turning over possibilities, sketching scenarios…thinking about women, and about home.

Now that he was so close to getting out, his memories of home became near painfully sweet. He thought of things like sausages fat enough to eat in slices, and motor cars on the right-hand side of the road, and really tall trees, and most of all his own language—words with guts and precision, hard consonants and pure vowels and the verb at the end of the sentence where it ought to be, finality and meaning in the same climactic terminal.

Thoughts of climaxes brought Gertrud to mind again: her face underneath his, makeup washed away by his kisses, eyes closing tight in pleasure then opening again to look with delight into his, mouth stretched wide in a permanent gasp, saying “Ja, Liebling, ja…”

It was silly. He had led the life of a monk for seven years, but she had no reason to do the same. She would have had a dozen men since Faber. She might even be dead, bombed by the RAF or murdered by the maniacs because her nose was half an inch too long or run over by a motor car in the blackout. Anyway, she would hardly remember him. He would probably never see her again. But she was important. She stood for something…for him to think about.

He did not normally permit himself the indulgence of sentiment. There was in his nature, in any case, a very cold streak, and he cultivated it. It protected him. Now, though, he was so close to success, and he felt free. Not to relax his vigilance, but at least to fantasize a little.

The storm was his safeguard so long as it continued. He would simply contact the U-boat with Tom’s radio on Monday, and its captain would send a dinghy into the bay as soon as the weather cleared. If the storm ended before Monday, there was a slight complication: the supply boat. David and Lucy would naturally expect him to take the boat back to the mainland.

Lucy came into his thoughts in vivid, full-color images he could not quite control. He saw her striking amber eyes watching him as he made a bandage for her thumb; her outline walking up the stairs in front of him, even clad as she was in shapeless man’s clothing; her heavy rounded breasts as she stood naked in the bathroom; and, as the images developed into fantasy, she leaned over the bandage and kissed his mouth, turned back on the stairs and took him in her arms, stepped out of the bathroom and placed his hands on her breasts.

He turned restlessly in the small bed, cursing the imagination that sent him dreams the like of which he hadn’t suffered since his schooldays. At that time, before he’d experienced the reality of sex, he had constructed elaborate sexual scenarios featuring the older women with whom he came into daily contact: the starchy Matron; Professor Nagel’s dark, thin, intellectual wife; the shopkeeper in the village who wore red lipstick and talked to her husband with contempt. Sometimes he put all three of them into one orgiastic fantasy. When, at age fifteen, he’d seduced, classically, a housemaid’s daughter in the twilight of a West Prussian forest, he let go of the imaginary orgies because they were so much better than the disappointing real thing. As young Heinrich he had been greatly puzzled by this; where was the blinding ecstasy, the sensation of soaring through the air like a bird, the mystical fusion of two bodies into one? The fantasies became painful, reminding him of his failure to make them real. Later, of course, the reality improved, and he formed the view that ecstasy came not from a man’s pleasure in a woman, but from each one’s pleasure in each other. He had voiced that opinion to his elder brother, who seemed to think it banal, a truism rather than a discovery; and before long he saw it that way too.

He became a good lover, eventually. He found sex interesting, as well as physically pleasant. He was never a great seducer…the thrill of conquest was not what he wanted. But he was expert at giving and receiving sexual gratification, without the expert’s illusion that technique was all. For some women he was a highly desirable man, and the fact that he didn’t know this only served to make him even more attractive.

He tried to remember how many women he had had: Anna, Gretchen, Ingrid, the American girl, those two whores in Stuttgart…he could not recall them all, but there could not have been more than about twenty. And Gertrud, of course.

None of them, he thought, had been quite as beautiful as Lucy. He gave an exasperated sigh; he had let this woman affect him just because he was close to home and had been so careful for so long. He was annoyed with himself. It was undisciplined; he must not relax until the assignment was over, and this was not over, not quite. Not yet.

There was the problem of avoiding going back on the supply boat. Several solutions came to mind: perhaps the most promising was to incapacitate the island’s inhabitants, meet the boat himself and send the boatman away with a cock-and-bull story. He could say he was visiting the Roses, had come out on another boat; that he was a relative, or a bird-watcher…anything. It was too small a problem to engage his full attention at the moment. Later, when and if the weather improved, he would select something.

He really had no serious problems. A lonely island, miles off the coast, with four inhabitants—it was an ideal hideout. From now on, leaving Britain was going to be as easy as breaking out of a baby’s playpen. When he thought of the situations he had already come through, the people he had killed—the five Home Guard men, the Yorkshire lad on the train, the Abwehr messenger—he considered himself now to be sitting pretty.

An old man, a cripple, a woman, and a child…Killing them would be so simple.

LUCY, TOO, lay awake. She was listening. There was a good deal to hear. The weather was an orchestra, rain drumming on the roof, wind fluting in the eaves of the cottage, sea performing glissandi with the beach. The old house talked too, creaking in its joints as it suffered the buffeting of the storm. Within the room there were more sounds: David’s slow, regular breathing, threatening but never quite achieving a snore as he slept deeply under the influence of a double dose of soporific, and the quicker, shallow breaths of Jo, sprawled comfortably across a camp bed beside the far wall.

The noise is keeping me awake, Lucy thought; then immediately—Who am I trying to fool? Her wakefulness was caused by Henry, who had looked at her naked body, and had touched her hands gently as he bandaged her thumb, and who now lay in bed in the next room, fast asleep. Probably.

He had not told her much about himself, she realized; only that he was unmarried. She did not know where he had been born—his accent gave no clue. He had not even hinted at what he did for a living, though she imagined he must be a professional man, perhaps a dentist or a soldier. He was not dull enough to be a solicitor, too intelligent to be a journalist, and doctors could never keep their profession secret for longer than five minutes. He was not rich enough to be a barrister, too self-effacing to be an actor. She would bet on the Army.

Did he live alone, she wondered? Or with his mother? Or a woman? What did he wear when he wasn’t fishing? Did he have a motor car? Yes, he would; something rather unusual. He probably drove very fast.

That thought brought back memories of David’s two-seater, and she closed her eyes tightly to shut out the nightmare images. Think of something else, think of something else.

She thought of Henry again, and realized—accepted—the truth: she wanted to make love to him.

It was the kind of wish that, in her scheme of things, afflicted men but not women. A woman might meet a man briefly and find him attractive, want to get to know him better, even begin to fall in love with him; but she did not feel an immediate physical desire, not unless she was…abnormal.

She told herself that this was ridiculous; that what she needed was to make love with her husband, not to copulate with the first eligible man who came along. She told herself she was not that kind.

All the same, it was pleasant to speculate. David and Jo were fast asleep; there was nothing to stop her from getting out of bed, crossing the landing, entering his room, sliding into bed next to him…

Nothing to stop her except character, good breeding and a respectable upbringing.

If she were going to do it with anybody, she would do it with someone like Henry. He would be kind, and gentle and considerate; he would not despise her for offering herself like a Soho streetwalker.

She turned over in the bed, smiling at her own foolishness; how could she possibly know whether he would despise her? She had only known him for a day, and he had spent most of that day asleep.

Still, it would be nice to have him look at her again, his expression of admiration tinged with some kind of amusement. It would be nice to feel his hands, to touch his body, to squeeze against the warmth of his skin.

She realized that her body was responding to the images in her mind. She felt the urge to touch herself, and resisted it, as she had done for four years. At least I haven’t dried up, like an old crone, she thought.

She moved her legs, and sighed as a warm sensation spread through her. This was getting unreasonable. It was time to go to sleep. There was just no way she would make love to Henry, or to anyone else, tonight.

With that thought she got out of bed and went to the door.

FABER HEARD a footfall on the landing, and he reacted automatically.

His mind cleared instantly of the idle, lascivious thoughts it had been occupied with. He swung his legs to the floor and slid out from under the bedclothes in a single fluid movement; then silently crossed the room to stand beside the window in the darkest corner, the stiletto knife in his right hand.

He heard the door open, heard the intruder step inside, heard the door close again. At that point he started to think rather than react. An assassin would have left the door open for a quick escape, and it occurred to him that there were a hundred reasons why it was impossible that an assassin should have found him here.

He ignored the thought—he had survived this long by catering to the one-in-a-thousand chance. The wind dropped momentarily, and he heard an indrawn breath, a faint gasp from beside his bed, enabling him to locate the intruder’s exact position. He moved.