It was such a perfectly outrageous statement he threw his head back and laughed, entwining a lock of her hair in his fingers.
“Genius,” he said. “Pure genius.”
“The hard part was thinking where to put it. The idea of the shoes, it was Lily’s.”
“It was perfection itself. Now, you must listen. Business. I have spoken to the Emir. We move to the next phase.”
“Yes. It’s time. To be honest, I was myself enjoying this first part. But already we have the Americans running in circles.”
“The next few moves will be the more challenging. Far more complex, intricate. It will not surprise you to learn that this assignment is yours.”
“I am ready.”
“I know.”
“Tell me, Pasha.”
“There is one more ambassador.”
“He’s a dead man.”
“No, no. You are not to kill him. We will do that when we have what we want from him. We want him alive. He has certain information that is vital to our purposes.”
“What, then?”
“A clean abduction. Snatch him. I will arrange for him to be brought here.”
“How? Caro, it’s one thing to kill. The…how you call it…logistics…of a kidnapping of such a public figure… molto difficile.”
“You’ll think of something, my precious Rose.”
He kissed her hard on the lips, crushed her against him, wanting to do more than possess her, wanting to both devour her and own her at the same time. Have his cake and eat it…he bent his head to her bosom.
Blessed and accursed.
“What was that,” Francesca whispered, whirling her head about.
“What, darling girl?”
“I heard a sound. Over there. In the jasmine bushes.”
“It is nothing. A peacock, perhaps. Come, now. To bed.”
The man lingered in the bed of jasmine for an hour after the two lovers had returned to the palace, savoring both the scent of the flowers and the sweetness of his situation. Finally, he rose and went to the fountain he still visited daily, listening to the songs of the splashing waters, longing to hear the voice that haunted his every waking moment.
He lowered himself to the broad rim of the fountain and spoke quietly to his love. His words were full of hope and joy and promise.
The heartbroken sumo, Ichi, enslaved by the Pasha for so long, now had both the means and the opportunity to escape this prison and return to his homeland, to the source of the sun, his beloved Michiko.
He stole back through the gardens.
Ichi moved as quickly and as quietly as his great bulk would allow. Someone was waiting for him. He would find her sitting on the small marble bench, she said. The far end of the reflecting pool in the secret heart of her private meditation garden, she had told him. What he would say to her would both break her heart and steel her spine. But, no longer would Ichi be alone in his determination to be free of bin Wazir’s velvet bonds.
He would have an ally in his struggle.
Yasmin.
Chapter Thirty
The Cotswolds
AMBROSE CONGREVE’S FEELINGS REGARDING THE SHOOTING of upland game birds were rivaled only remotely by his feelings as regards to fishing. He would as soon grasp a wriggling, slimy creature and wrench its lips from a fishhook as he would pluck a bloody pheasant from the gorse and stuff the still warm corpse inside his waxed jacket, which was precisely what he was doing at this very moment.
A fishhook, the symbol used in logic to represent an “if-then” proposition, captured his sentiments at this moment perfectly. If you catch something, or shoot something, you’ve ultimately got to do something with the bloody thing.
He was still amazed he’d managed to hit the damned bird. His gun, a fine prewar Purdey twelve-bore, one of a brace lent him for the occasion by Alex Hawke—Alex being an ardent practitioner of the sport and one-time runner-up for the King’s Cup—had not seen a lot of action today. The birds got up quickly, often too close or too far away to get off a shot, and, every time he mounted the gun to his shoulder, all he could see were dogs, beaters, and his fellow guns. He was so terrified of perhaps shooting any of them, that, until just moments ago, he hadn’t pulled a trigger all day.
It was late in the day, and he was cold and wet and thoroughly tired of mucking about in the thickets of gorse and bramble in tight-fitting green gumboots. And more than ready to head home, shed these damp tweeds, and settle in for a cozy whiskey by the crackling fireside. His morning had gotten off to a rotten start, with Alex practically lecturing him, lecturing, for all love, about sporting behavior in the field. Not that he didn’t need such a tutorial; God help him, he hadn’t picked up a shotgun in years.
On one of the many bookshelves in his small flat in London was a book he’d read and loved as a child. One of his favorites, actually, an extraordinary book by a man named Dacre Balsdon. Its title still spoke volumes to Congreve.
The Pheasant Shoots Back.
Congreve had been a successful young inspector at Scotland Yard when he first met Alex Hawke, age nine. The trail of a notorious jewel thief had led him to the smallest of the Channel Islands, a fog-shrouded place called Greybeard Island. In the course of his investigation, he visited the home where Alex lived in the care of his elderly grandfather, the chief suspect in the bizarre case.
The very idea that one of England’s wealthiest men, an island recluse named Lord Richard Hawke, had pirated his own late wife’s jewelry in a daring daytime heist at Sotheby’s in London had drawn the young inspector to the matter. Congreve, with the assistance of his suspect, Lord Hawke, solved that case. Ironically enough, it was the butler who had done it. A fellow named Edward Eding, who had faithfully served in his lordship’s employ for decades, had masterminded the crime. In the process, priceless emeralds, tiaras, and Faberge eggs belonging to Alex Hawke’s late grandmother were returned to the London auction house. And Ambrose Congreve’s burgeoning reputation as a master criminalist was solidified.
The clever young detective and the aging inhabitant of the drafty old pile known as Castle Hawke thereafter became fast friends. Congreve became a frequent guest at the great house on a rocky bluff overlooking the channel; and he was to prove an important figure and mentor in the life of young Alex Hawke.
Brutally orphaned at age seven, Alex was easily the most curious boy Ambrose had ever encountered. As Congreve would remark years later, “He questions the questions more than the answers.” So Alex Hawke had relied on young Detective Congreve and his aging grandfather, Lord Hawke, to teach him everything they knew of the nature of the world and its inhabitants.
These early years of his childhood were spent covering even the most arcane of subjects; and for Ambrose to sit here now, silently feigning rapt attention while Alex Hawke, his erstwhile pupil, expounded on the art of killing small animals with high-powered weapons, was tiresome in the extreme.
He had learned, at breakfast that very morning, that to wound birds by very long shots was almost a crime. And that to destroy game meant for the table by shooting birds that were too near was almost as serious an error. A man who can shoot, Alex had informed him later, as they bounced along in the mud-splashed Range Rover, picks off his birds in the head or neck so as to avoid damaging the body for the cooks and the table.
“Look here, Alex, I must say,” he’d replied, “I haven’t picked up a field gun in thirty years and now you’re telling me I’m supposed to shoot the wee beasties only in the head?”
