The drive northwards seemed endless. Each episode of the last few days since last she had seen her son played over an dover in her mind until she felt that she was going slowly mad.
On the cross-Channel ferry, she forsook the loud bonhomie of the crowded saloon and went up on to the boatdeck. It was a cold grey day, with the north wind kicking the tops off the swells in dashing white spurts of spray. The wind and her despair chilled her through, until she was shivering uncontrollably even in her padded anorak. However, in the end it was the ache in her swollen breasts that drove her below. In the women's toilet she used the express pump to draw off the flow that should have been for her son.
'Oh, Nicky, Nicky!' she cried silently, as she discharged the rich creamy liquid into the toilet- bowl, and she imagined once again his hot little mouth on her nipples and the smell and the feel of him against her breast.
She found herself weeping, and with a huge effort controlled herself.
'You're losing your grip on reality,' she warned herself. 'You've got to be strong now. You can't let go. For Nicky's sake, you must be strong. No more crying and moping - no more.' It was raining when she drove into Cadogan Square, and the flat seemed chilly and uninviting. While she unpacked she thought about the promise that she had made her 15e father. Suddenly she threw down the dress that she held and ran through to the drawing-room.
'International, I want to place a call to Cape Town, South Africa.' At this time of night, the delay was less than ten minutes, and she heard the peals of the telephone at the other end. One of the servants answered it, and as she opened her mouth to ask for her father Ramsey's strict injunction came back to her with all its force and threat. 'Your disobedience will have dire consequences for Nicky.' She replaced the receiver on its cradle without speaking, and resigned herself to wait for the promised contact.
Nothing happened for six days. She never left the flat, not daring to put herself beyond the reach of the telephone. She rang nobody, spoke to nobody except the housekeeper, and tried to keep herself occupied by reading and watching television. The uncertainty aggravated her despair, and she found that, although she stared at the pages of her book or at the small flickering screen of the television set, the printed words and the images were meaningless. Only her agony was real. Only her loss had poignant meaning. Only her pain abided.
She could barely bring herself to eat, and within three days her milk-flow had dried up. She lost weight dramatically. Her hair, which was one of the high points of her beauty, turned dull and dry. Her face in the mirror was gaunt, her eyes sank into bruised-looking cavities and her golden amber Mediterranean tan became sallow and yellow like the skin of a malaria sufferer.
She waited, and the waiting was torture. Each hour was an insupportable eternity. Then, on the sixth day, the telephone rang. She snatched it up with desperate haste, before the second peal.
'I have a message from Ramsey.' It was a woman's voice with an elusive accent, probably mid-European. 'Leave now, immediately. Take a taxi to the junction of Royal Hospital Road and the Embankment. Walk down the Embankment towards Westminster. Somebody will greet you with the name Red Rose. Follow their orders,' said the caller. 'Repeat these instructions, please.' Breathlessly Isabella obeyed. 'Good,' said the woman, and broke the connection.
Isabella had not walked further than a hundred yards along the Embankment above the Thames when a small unmarked van passed her, travelling slowly in the same direction. It pulled into the kerb ahead of her, and as she drew level with it the rear door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman in grey overalls sitting on the sidebench of the body of the van.
'Red Rose,' she said and Isabella recognized her voice from their telephone conversation. 'Get in!' Quickly Isabella slipped into the van and sat on the bench opposite the woman. She slammed the door, and immediately the van pulled away.
The body of the van was without windows or any ope i g except for the ventilator in the roof above Isabella's head. She could not see out and, though she tried to track their course by the turns and stops, she was soon totally confused and abandoned the attempt.
'Where are you taking me?' she asked the woman opposite her.
'Silence, please.' And Isabella resigned herself She pulled her collar up around her ears, and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her anorak.
They drove for twenty-three minutes by her wristwatch, and then the van stopped again and the rear door was opened from outside.
They were in a parking garage. She judged from the unpainted concrete pillars that supported the low roof and from the steep access-ramp at the far end of the long narrow chamber that it was an underground parking facility.
The woman in the grey overalls took her arm and helped her down from the van. The touch of her hand made Isabella aware of just how powerful she was. The hand felt like the paw of a gorilla, and she towered above Isabella with wide meaty shoulders under the grey cloth.
'This way,' she ordered. Still holding her arm, she led Isabella to the lift doors opposite the van. Despite the painful grip, Isabella glanced around her quickly. There were a dozen or so other vehicles parked in the bays alongside the van; at least two of them had diplomatic number-plates.
The doors of the lift opened, and the woman pushed Isabella into it. A glance at the control panel showed Isabella that her assumption had been correct. The lighted stage-indicator showed that they were at 'Basement Level W. The woman pushed the button for the third floor and they rode up in silence, until the lift stopped with the stage-indicator at 'Level III' and her escort urged her out into a bare corridor with cork flooring. They walked down it side by side, and still in silence. The corridor was empty and the doors on each side closed.
As they approached the end of the corridor, the facing door slid open.
Another large female with flat Slavic features, dressed also in grey overalls, ushered them into what appeared to be a small lecture-room or an intimate movie-theatre. A double row of easy chairs faced the raised dais and the screen that covered the far wall.
Isabella's escort led her to the chair in the front row centre.
'Sit down,' she said, and Isabella sank down on the smooth cold plastic padding. The two women moved around and took up their position, standing behind Isabella. For several minutes, there was silence. Then the small door to the right of the dais opened and a man came through' He moved slowly, stiffly, like a frail and sick old man. His hair was dead white, with a yellowish tinge, and hung over his forehead and ears. His features were very pale, lined and seamed with age and suffering, so that Isabella felt a twinge of sympathy for him, until the light caught his eyes.
With a small jolt of intense distaste she recognized those eyes. Once she had been with her father on a chartered fishing-boat out of Black River.
Shasa had been trolling a live bonito along the oceanic drop-off under the shadow of Le Morne Brabant on the island of Mauritius when he had hooked into a gigantic mako shark.
After a battle which lasted two hours, he had dragged the creature alongside. As its pointed snout broke through the surface, Isabella had been leaning over the rail and she had looked into its eyes. They were black and pitiless, without definite iris or pupil, two holes that seemed to reach down into hell itself. Those were the same eyes that studied her now.
She held her breath under their implacable scrutiny, until at last the man spoke. Then his voice came as a surprise. It was low and hoarse. She had to lean forward slightly to make sense of the words.
'Isabella Courtney, from now on we will never use that name again in any communication. You will be referred to and you will refer to yourself only as Red Rose. Do you understandf She nodded, not trusting her voice to reply. He lifted the cigarette that smouldered between his fingers and drew deeply upon it. He spoke again through a cloud of exhaled smoke.
'I have a message for you, in the form of a video-tape recording.' He stepped down from the dais and took the chair at the end of the row furthest from her.
As he settled into it, the overhead lights dimmed. She heard the faint hum of electronic equipment, and then the screen lit up. The scene it displayed was a bare white-tiled room - a laboratory or an operating-theatre, she decided.
There was a table in the centre of the room, and on it was a glass-sided tank much like one of the aquariums in which ornamental tropical fish were displayed in a pet shop. The tank was filled with water to within a few inches of the top. On the table-top beside the tank stood some sort of electronic cabinet and an array of instruments and medical paraphernalia.
She recognized a portable oxygencylinder and an oxygen- mask. The mask was a din-dnutive model suitable for infants and very small children.
A man was busy at the table. His back was towards the ieo camera and his features were hidden. He wore some type of white laboratory-coat. He turned to face the camera, and Isabella saw that he wore a cloth theatre-cap and surgical mask.
His voice was dispassionate as he began to speak, and his accent was foreign, east European. He seemed to be addressing Isabella directly out of the screen.
'Your orders were to speak to nobody, not in Malaga or elsewhere. You deliberately disobeyed those orders.' He was staring at her from the screen with disembodied
