combed his brazen waves of hair, watching himself in the mirror.
The strain did not show on his face, he was sure of that.
The facade was intact, devoid of cracks. He had always had the
strength, the courage to ride with his decisions. This had been a hard
ride, however, the hardest of his life.
He closed his eyes briefly, and saw Golden Dawn standing on her ways.
Like a mountain. The vision gave him strength, he felt it rising deep
within him, welling up to fill his soul.
They thought of him only as a money-man, a paper man.
There was no salt in his blood nor steel in his guts - that was what
they said of him in the City. When he had ousted Berg from Christy
Marine, they had shied off, watching him shrewdly, standing aside and
waiting for him to show his guts, forcing him to live upon the fat of
Christy Marine, devouring himself like a camel in the desert, running
him thin.
The bastards, he thought, but it was without rancour.
They had done merely what he would have done, they had played by the
hard rules which Duncan knew and respected, and by those same rules,
once he had shown his guts to be of steel, they would ply him with
largesse. This was the testing time. It was so close now, two months
still to live through - yet those sixty days seemed as daunting as the
hard year through which he had lived already.
The stranding of Golden Adventurer had been a disaster.
Her hull value had formed part of the collateral on which he had
borrowed; the cash she generated with her luxury cruises was budgeted
carefully to carry him through the dangerous times before Golden Dawn
was launched. Now all that had altered drastically. The flow of cash
had been switched off, and he had to find six million in real hard money
- and find it before the 10th of the month. Today was the 6th, and time
was running through his fingers like quicksilver.
If only he had been able to stall Berg. He felt a corrosive welling up
of hatred again; if only he had been able to stall him. The bogus offer
of partnership might have held him just long enough, but Berg had
brushed it aside contemptuously. Duncan had been forced to scurry about
in undignified haste, trying to pull together the money.
Kurt Streicher was not the only one suddenly unavailable, it was strange
how they could smell it on a man, he had the same gift of detecting
vulnerability or weakness in others so he understood how it worked. It
was almost as though the silver blotches showed on his hands and face
and he walked the city pavements chanting the old leper's cry, Unclean,
Beware, Unclean. With so much at stake, it was a piddling amount, six
million for two months, the insignificance of it was an insult, and he
felt the tension in his belly muscles again and the rising hot acid
sting of his digestive juices. He forced himself to relax, glancing
again from the window to find that the Rolls was turning into the
cul-de-sac of yellow-face brick apartments piled upon each other like
hen-coops, angular and unimaginatively lower middle class.
He squared his shoulders and watched himself in the mirror, practising
the smile. It was only six million, and for only two months, he
reminded himself, as the Rolls slid to a halt before one of the
