Brute did he begin the next move in the complicated game.
“I couldn’t tell you on the telephone-” he said in the intimate darkness and warmth of her limousine. “I had an approach from Atlas. The head of Atlas summoned me to New York. That’s where I was when you called. They are also onto Caliph.” She sighed then, and her hand stole into his. “I was waiting for you to tell me, Peter,” she said simply, and she sighed again. “I knew you’d gone to America, and I had a terrible premonition that you were going to lie to me. I don’t know what I would have done then.” And Peter felt a lance of conscience driven up under his ribs, and with it the throb of concern she had known of his journey to New York, but how? Then he remembered her sources’.
“Tell me,” she said, and he told her everything, except the nagging question marks which Kingston Parker had placed after her name.
The missing years, the Mossad connection with the Baron, and those ten nameless men.
“They don’t seem to know that Caliph uses that name,” Peter told her. “But they seem to be pretty certain that you are hunting him, and you’ve hired me for that purpose.” They discussed it quietly as the small cavalcade of cars rushed through the night, and later when she came to his suite, they went on talking, holding each other as they whispered in the night, and Peter was surprised that he could act so naturally, that the doubts seemed to evaporate so easily when he was with her.
“Kingston Parker still has me as a member of Atlas,” Peter explained. “And I did not deny it, nor protest. We want to find Caliph, and if I still have status with Atlas it will be useful, of that I am certain,”
“I agree. Atlas can help us especially now that they are also aware that Caliph exists.” They made love in the dawn, very deeply satisfying love that left bodies and minds replete, and then keeping her discretion she slipped away before it was light, but they met again an hour later for breakfast together -in the Garden Room.
She poured coffee for him, and indicated the small parcel beside his plate.
“We aren’t quite as discreet as we think we are, She chuckled. “Somebody seems to know where you are spending your evenings.” He weighed the parcel in his right palm; it was the size of a roll of 35 men. film, wrapped in brown paper, sealed with red wax.
“Apparently it came special delivery yesterday evening.” She broke one of the crisp croissants into her plate, and smiled at him with that special slant of her green eyes.
The address was typed on a stick-on label, and the stamps were British, franked in south London the previous morning.
Suddenly Peter was assailed with a terrifying sense of foreboding; the presence of some immense overpowering evil seemed to pervade the gaily furnished room.
“What is it, Peter?” Her voice cracked with alarm.
“Nothing,“he said. “It’s nothing.”
“You suddenly went deadly pale, Peter. Are you sure you are all right?”
“Yes. I’m all right.” He used his table knife to lift the wax seal and then unrolled the brown paper.
It was a small screw-topped bottle of clear glass, and the liquid it contained was clear also. Some sort of preservative, he realized immediately, spirits or formaldehyde.
Hanging suspended in the liquid was a soft white object.
“What is it?“Magda asked.
Peter felt cold tentacles of nausea closing around his stomach.
The object turned slowly, floating free in its bottle, and there was a flash of vivid scarlet.
“Does your mother allow you to wear nail varnish now, Melissa-Jane?” He heard the question echoed in his memory, and saw his daughter flirt her hands, and the scarlet flash of her nails. The same vivid scarlet.
“Oh yes though not to school, of course. You keep forgetting I’m almost fourteen, Daddy.” The floating white object was a human finger. It had been severed at the first joint, and the preservative had bleached the exposed flesh a sickly white. The skin had puckered and wrinkled like that of a drowned man. Only the painted fingernail was unaltered, pretty and festively gay.
The nausea caught Peter’s throat, choking him and he coughed and retched drily as he stared at the tiny bottle.
The telephone rang three times before it was answered.
“Cynthia Barrow.” Peter recognized his ex-wife’s voice, even though it was ragged with strain and grief.
“Cynthia, it’s Peter.”
“Oh, thank God, Peter. I have been trying to find you for two days.”
“What is it?”
“Is Melissa-Jane with you, Peter?”
“No.” He felt as though the earth had lurched under his feet.
“She’s gone, Peter. She’s been gone for two nights now.
I’m going out of my mind.”
“Have you informed the police?”
“Yes, of course. “The edge of hysteria was in her voice.
“Stay where you are,” Peter said. “I’m coming to England right now, but leave any message for me at the Dorchester.” He hung up quickly, sensing that her grief would overflow at any moment and knowing that he could not handle it now.
Across the ormolu Louis Quatorze desk Magda was pale, tense, and she did not have to ask the question, it was in the eyes that seemed too large for her face.
He did not have to reply to that question. He nodded once, an abrupt jerky motion, and then he dialled again and while he waited he could not take his eyes from the macabre trophy that stood in its bottle in the centre of the desk.
“Colonel Noble.” Peter snapped into the mouthpiece.
“Tell him it’s General Stride and it’s urgent.”
Colin came on within a minute. ““They’ve taken Melissa-Jane.”
“Who? I don’t understand.”
“The enemy. They’ve taken her.”
“Jesus God! Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. They sent me her finger in a bottle.” Colin was silent for a few seconds, and then his voice was subdued. “That’s sick. Christ, that’s really sick.”
“Get onto the police. Use all your clout. They must be keeping quiet on it. There has been no publicity.
I want to be in on the hunt for these animals. Get Thor involved, find out what you can. I’m on my way now. I’ll let you know what flight I am on.”
“I’ll keep a listening watch at this number round the clock, Colin promised. “And I’ll have a driver meet you.” Colin hesitated. “Peter, I’m sorry. You know that.”
“Yes. I know.”
“We will all be with you, all the way.” Peter dropped the receiver onto its arm, and across the desk Magda stood up resolutely.
“I’ll come with you to London, she said, and Peter reached out and took her hand.
“No,” he said gently. “Thank you, but no. There will be nothing for you to do.”
“Peter, I want to be with you through this terrible thing.
I feel as though it’s all my fault.”
“That’s not true.”
“She’s such a lovely child.”
“You will be more help to me here, said Peter firmly.
“Try through all your sources, any little scrap of information.” “Yes, very well.” She accepted the decision, without further argument. “Where can I find you if I have anything?” He gave her Colin Noble’s private number at Thor, scribbling it on the pad beside the telephone. “Either there or at the Dorchester,” he said.
“At least I will come with you as far as Paris,” she said.
Heathrow Airport. It was on the front page of the Evening Standard and Peter snatched a copy off the news Stand and read it avidly during the drive up to London.
The victim was abducted At the front gate of her home in Leaden Street, Cambridge at eleven o’clock on Thursday. A neighbour saw her speak to the occupants of a maroon Triumph saloon car, and then enter the back
