He kept silent about it now, for much the same reason.
For nearly two years, Hawke had simply disappeared from his own life. He locked up his house in Gloucestershire and fled. He ran to escape his feelings, to repair his heart. As far as he could run. Tibet. Malaya. Burma. A tea-and-vegan lifestyle, no liquor at all. The daily yin-yang discipline of tai chi. Mountain climbing. Meditation. Fasting. A Zen retreat on the beautiful Thai island of Koh Samui. It didn’t work, none of it.
Alone in his one-room hut by the Gulf of Martaban, when the night was dead still, he could hear the black dog. Could see him crouching there, just inside the green edge of the leafy jungle, panting, all pink gums and bared fangs. Ready to pounce. He ran home. Opened the house in Belgrave Square. Once back in London, he’d tried liquor. Mr. Gosling’s rum. Barrels of the high-proof stuff. That hadn’t worked, either, and he’d felt like hell every morning in the bargain.
His closest friend, Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve, had told him perhaps this period of mourning was growing unhealthily long. Perhaps it was time to begin to see other women.
Looking at Jet in his bed now, he thought that, yes, perhaps the world-famous detective had solved yet another of life’s mysteries.
It was time. Hawke was the kind of man who needed a woman. Perhaps this one was the one he needed.
Chapter Four
Cap d’Antibes
AT ONE OF THE PINK LUNCHEON TABLES SCATTERED RANDOMLY beneath a copse of whistling pine trees, Hawke gave chase. Jet was a girl, he now thought, who wanted to be caught. His grandfather, a font of enduring wisdom, had said to Alex at a tender age, “Never chase a girl who doesn’t want to be caught.” The nine-year-old boy hadn’t really understood the lesson then. He did now.
The sun had returned to the sky, as pale as a waning moon. He was glad he’d come. He tried to be witty and charming throughout the bouillabaisse and poisson du jour and sorbet au citron.
It wasn’t easy. He felt like a two-bit stage actor who kept flubbing his lines. Out of practice, he thought.
After the luncheon, the two of them had strolled up a freshly washed gravel path bordered on either side by manicured gardens of alyssum, salvia, and lobelia. The wide path rose up a gentle slope and led to an exquisitely beautiful hotel sitting atop the breast of a leafy hill. The Hotel du Cap definitely lived up to its billing.
It had been a pleasant enough afternoon. The girl was stunning. Hawke had eaten a dozen portugaises and washed the delicious oysters down with cold white wine. The black dog was nowhere to be seen.
Popping an oyster into his mouth, he had said to Jet, “You know who’s the bravest man who ever lived?”
“Let me guess. You.”
“No. The first man ever to eat an oyster.”
And, somehow, there had been more oysters and then more champagne on the return voyage to the Carlton pier and then at dinner and in Le Petite Bar downstairs and somehow the beautiful Jet had ended up here in his bed.
“Le vent,” she said again now in the darkness of the Carlton bedroom.
“What about it?” Hawke said, stroking back a lock of her hair, black as a crow’s wing and cut on the diagonal across the sharp planes of her cheeks.
“C’est mal, this wind.”
“Winds have a habit of blowing themselves out sooner or later,” Hawke said. “Like men, I suppose.”
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
“Oh, London and thereabouts. How about you?”
“I have a flat in Paris. The Avenue Foch.”
“Very posh.”
“This is not your suite, Mr. Hawke,” Jet said, athletically disengaging her body from his, rolling over, and firing a cigarette, sucking hungrily, her dark eyes flaring in the glow of the red coal.
“Really? Why on earth do you say that?” he asked, his own keen blue eyes laughing.
“No toothbrush. No razor,” she said, exhaling a plume of harsh purple smoke toward the ceiling. He looked at her carefully. She had the blackest eyes. He liked to believe he could read people through their eyes. He assumed most people felt that way. He’d been trying to read Jet’s eyes all day long with no success. Inscrutable was the word.
“Ah. Well, there’s that,” he said.
“And the name on the card. Out in the hall by your door. You wrote it yourself. It’s not the engraved placard the hotel concierge provides for guests upon arrival.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“You are a—what do you call it—a cat burglar?”
“No, my dear Jet, I am not. I hate cats,” he said, swinging his long legs off the edge of the bed. “Besides, they’d never allow pets in this pretty palace.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out to the terrace to check something. I have an old acquaintance sailing for Shanghai on the evening tide. I have to make sure he misses the boat.”
“Don’t let me keep you, Mr. Hawke.”
He didn’t bother with his shirt and trousers, just shouldered into his dinner jacket and slipped out through the French doors, grabbing a pair of rubber-coated Zeiss Ikon military binoculars he’d left hanging by a strap from the doorknob. Raising the glasses to his eyes, he saw the sea whipped into a frenzy. Strange weather was, Commander Alexander Hawke knew, not at all unusual in this corner of the world.
The entire Mediterranean Sea passes through the eye of a needle. Only fifteen miles of water separated Ceuta in North Africa from the Rock, that headless limestone sphinx crouching on the tiny peninsula of Gibraltar. The ancients called the rockpiles standing on either side of the straits the Pillars of Hercules. Beyond them lay chaos, the dark and spooky ocean they called Mare Tenebrosum.
Spooky enough out there tonight, Alex Hawke thought. The roiling sky was a bruised color, yellowish and grey on the horizon.
He allowed himself a thin smile. There was something in him that loved bad weather. Sunny days were a dime a dozen in the South of France and this night he was glad of a little mood and drama. Besides, foul weather might keep a few prying eyes and ears battened down and out of his way. His mission tonight was certainly straightforward enough. A simple hostage snatch demanding basic techniques that were, once learned the hard way in the Special Boat Squadron, never forgotten.
But, as usual in the life of Alexander Hawke, the implications of failure were enormous.
He swung the Ikons west to the harbor proper and found what he was looking for in the crowd of grand yachts, fishing boats, and a thicket of sailboat masts. An ancient rust bucket called the Star of Shanghai. She’d arrived from Casablanca and was en route from Cannes to Aden and then on to Rangoon. Aboard her, he’d learned two days ago, was an involuntary American passenger. A CIA chap, whose very life was hanging by—
“Alex?” Her voice floated out from the darkened bedroom. She spoke both English and French with a lilting Chinese accent. The words came to him like a tinkling wind chime.
“Sorry,” he said above the wind, scanning the horizon with the Ikons. “Just give me a moment, dear. Have some more champagne. The bucket is by the bed.”
In his mind’s eye, he saw his old friend Ambrose Congreve smirking at that one. Caviar, champagne, fancy rooms at the Carlton. And in his bed—
He would never have taken the wildly expensive suite (ever since his first stint in the navy, he’d loved small bedrooms with single beds and crisp white linen) had not the corner rooms offered one very specific advantage. The eighth-floor terrace of Suite 801 happened to present a panoramic view of the entire harbor. From this luxurious perch, Hawke could monitor the comings and goings of every vessel in the harbor, unseen. And so he had done for the last two days.
