Undercover Sultan

In the past few weeks there had been a new suffix used on more and more incoming Ghasib data, but since most were encrypted she had not been able to glean much.

She opened each file before sending it, and read it if possible. Then she downloaded it onto a zip disk and deleted it from the secret folder. When she had checked and downloaded all the new files she would take the zip disk to her own computer and send the files off to Hal.

She never sent anything out from the secret computers. Michel’s firewall was extremely efficient, and he had software monitoring all traffic from this machine.

Mariel lifted her head, listening for a moment. Nothing. Listening was an automatic response, making sure you didn’t get too deep in what you were doing. She checked the clock—11:38—then clicked on the next Ghasib-prefixed e-mail. A few lines of encryption gibberish met her eyes, and she instantly exited again and clicked it to download to the zip disk. The next few were the same.

The last file had only just arrived, so Michel hadn’t seen it yet. Mariel felt a curious presentiment as she clicked it open. Maybe it would be significant. Maybe this would be the break she needed.

Another encrypted message, with an attachment this time. Mariel bit her lip as she clicked on the attachment.

It was a photograph. The image slowly formed on the screen, and Mariel blinked and opened her eyes in dumb disbelief. It was no one she recognized, but it was the most gorgeous man she had ever clapped eyes on.

In her life.

Mariel sat gazing at the handsome masculine face while her brain circuits started misfiring, one by two by four, triggering off a chain of explosions that blew reason into the void. She knew about the reality of love at first sight. Coup de foudre, it was called in French. She believed it was possible.

But she had never heard before of anyone falling head over heels in love with a face in a photograph.

Two

Waving dark hair above a broad, wide forehead. Strong square eyebrows. Eyes dark with an intensity that seemed to burn her. A mouth tilted with devilment, passion in the beautifully shaped full lips, and a kind of wildness in the expression as a whole. Like looking into a storm.

Who was he? Mariel had a deep feeling of recognition, but was that real, or just the effect the face was having on her, as if she had known him in another lifetime, was destined to love him in this one?

She shook her head, trying to re-establish a sense of reality, and glanced at the computer clock again. She had lost her sense of time. Was it really only 11:48, or had the clock frozen along with her brain? She was suddenly frightened. How long had she sat here, staring at this not-quite-stranger’s face?

It was her job to download the file, she reminded herself, like a child who had forgotten the alphabet. But she could not bear to lose the face. Without any pause for rational thought, she dragged the cursor over Print. She clicked the mouse, heard the printer whirr into life, and then bit her lip with regret. This, she told herself, was the way spies crashed in flames—letting your guard down for one fatal second.

But it was too late now.

She downloaded the file to the disk, then deleted it from the secret folder. Michel would never know it had been opened.

Two minutes later she was still standing there, the zip disk in her hand, waiting as the printer ground back and forth over the page. The colour printer printed slowly, and it printed exceeding fine. What a fool she was! She ought to be getting out of here, but now she was rivetted, waiting. Printers were not her field. She was afraid of what might happen if she tried to abort the print. Would it spew the thing out the next time it was activated?

Usually when she had finished, Mariel locked this office before returning to her own desk to send the contents of her disk. But the printer was going to take forever. So to save time she went out to her computer and slipped the zip disk into the slot.

Michel had secret software on every computer in the place, which allowed him to recap every keystroke his employees typed. She was pretty sure Michel checked each of the firm’s computers in rotation every week, reading e-mails and the history of everyone’s cyber activity. If so, he never found any evidence of her Friday-night activities. Mariel simply disabled the program whenever she wanted an activity to go unrecorded. She did that now, then fired off the contents of the disk to Hal’s safe address, and deleted all record of the transaction before restoring the monitoring software.

She wiped the zip floppy, dropped it into a drawer, and went back to the private office. The printer had finally finished.

Mariel plucked the page from its tray, and again all thought left her head as her eyes fell on the image of that perfect, masculine face. What a devil-may-care smile, what eyes! Who was he?

So entranced was the spy that she did not hear the sounds of stealthy entry in the outer office. She heaved a sigh, flicked off the light, pulled open the door, and stepped through.

The man getting his bearings in the outer office was as surprised as she was. For a moment they were silent, gaping at each other.

“It’s you!” Mariel whispered, amazed, as the world reeled and rocked and all the landmarks she knew sank without trace.

The man standing halfway across the office in the gloom, looking much more dangerous in the flesh, was the man whose picture she had just taken from the printer.

Haroun al Muntazir frowned and cursed himself for a fool. Ash was right, he was too impetuous. To break in to the office when someone was in it was the work of an ignorant amateur.

But the woman in front of him was a mystery. The brassy red wig and the black leather micromini and boots might have been enough to tell him what her profession was, even if she hadn’t been so sexually alluring that he had the urge to negotiate terms with her there and then. But what was she doing in Michel Verdun’s office?

When he managed to unfix his eyes from her, his gaze fell on the grotesque picture on the screen in the office behind her. A porn video. That went some way towards explaining her presence—did Verdun come to the office at night to indulge his extramarital passions?

Which meant he was behind her in the office? Hell! thought Haroun. Just my luck I’ve broken in on orgy night.

Then he belatedly heard what she’d said. It’s you. What did that mean? Some kind of hooker’s ploy to convince a client he was the stuff of her fantasies?

It followed that she didn’t know her client by sight. Maybe she thought he was the one who had booked her time.

With typical boldness, he decided to bluff. He could get out of this yet.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he agreed. “Have you been given the details of what’s expected?”

She nibbled at a corner of her mouth, unconsciously turning her red mouth into an exotic, inviting flower. Haroun’s blood was too quick to respond.

Mariel quietly folded the paper she held, hiding the photo. How on earth had he got in? Her brain rushed to fill the gap—had Michel given him a key? Had the photo been sent to identify him to Michel prior to a meeting? Did that mean Michel would be arriving here?

Did his question mean this man was assuming she was the contact he was due to meet? She forgot the outfit she was wearing, what she must look like to him.

“No. Um…I’m filling in at the last minute,” she stammered. “Michel—is sick. So if you don’t mind briefing me…”

Haroun breathed a quiet sigh. The fates were being kind to him tonight. So Verdun’s regular girl, Michelle, was ill, and the replacement needed briefing. Well, he certainly would enjoy briefing her, but the important thing was to get out of here before Verdun arrived.

“My car,” he said, looking at his watch so that she would understand he was a man in a hurry.

She felt a surge of sharp regret that the face she had fallen for belonged to a man connected to a villain like Michel Verdun. Then her spy’s practical brain took over. She wondered whether he bought secrets, or sold them. She might, with luck, pick up something interesting from him, and that would be the last of her usefulness to her cousin Hal. Because her work at Michel Verdun et Associés was finished as of tonight.

“All right, I—I’ll just get my bag.” She whirled to run lightly to her desk, as eager to get out of here as the stranger could want. She picked up the items she had tossed on her desk, dumped them back in the drawer.

It took only a second, time which Haroun passed in contemplation of the sloping hips, the firm bare thighs. “Let’s go,” she said, kicking the drawer shut. She had just picked up her bag when she noticed that the secret office door was hanging open. She ran lightly back across the room.

As she reached it, there was the sound of a key in the main door.

Mariel froze, her eyes flying to the stranger. In amazement she saw that he was running silently towards her. He was much bigger than she. He scooped her up in one arm and shoved her through the doorway into the secret office ahead of him. One hand clamping over her mouth, he pushed the door almost shut.

They were in darkness, the only light in the room the glow from the two horrible screen savers flickering on the computers.

His hand tightened over her mouth as the sound of the outer office door opening reached them. “If you make a sound I will strangle you,” the stranger whispered in her ear. Mariel shook her head, her eyes wide, speechlessly promising to be silent, and slowly his hand slipped down to her throat, where it rested in light warning.

A crack of illumination told her that whoever had entered the outer office had put the main light on. It had to be Michel.

Her only hope now was not to be discovered. And clearly Adonis here felt the same. But who was he, then? If he was afraid of Michel, Michel clearly hadn’t given him a key. So how had he got in? And why?

He stood beside her, his body hard, watching through the tiny crack of the door. She could smell the musky scent of him, feel the firm muscles of his arm, his thigh, his chest, as he held her.

“The alarm’s been coded,” she heard a mutter from the outer office. Michel’s voice. Who was he with? She turned in the stranger’s hold and tried to see out the crack. One finger slipped up to her lips in warning.

Probably it was the danger that transmogrified that light brushing of his finger over her mouth into the most erotic thing she had ever experienced. Mariel’s blood raced so that she felt faint. Her body seemed to melt with yearning for the hard curves of the stranger’s body.

His voice rasped in her ear again. “There is your client,” he whispered.

Michel was just coming into her line of vision, moving towards the back corner of the outer office. He hadn’t noticed that the secret office door was ajar, but he would.

“You can go out to him.”

He probably planned to take off in her wake, but the last thing Mariel could do now was walk out and greet Michel. “No,” she whispered desperately, just as another man came into view, his eyes dangerous and wary. “No.”

“No?” The stranger’s gaze narrowed, raking her face in the thread of light in a new assessment.

The second man had a gun. A small, square automatic. Mariel felt as if her eyes were glued to the neat silver barrel in his hand. Beside her, the dark man went still.

“Let them go past. Run for the door. I will follow,” he whispered briefly, and waited only for her answering nod before pushing her to one side.

The armed man was just turning, Michel was facing in the other direction. It was now or never, and as the stranger whipped the door open and launched a kick at the gunman’s elbow, Mariel tore out the doorway behind him and headed for the main entrance.

She heard the kick connect, a shout, and the sounds of struggle. Michel cried out in surprise. Mariel didn’t waste a moment looking back. She wrenched open the door and dashed down the hall.

Behind her there were more shouts, and pounding footsteps. She hit the button summoning the elevators as she ran by, but carried straight on past, heading for the door to the stairwell she had entered by.

She burst through it, then turned to look out. The stranger was pounding down the hall after her, giving her a chance to appreciate his athletic perfection. She opened the door further.

“Ici!” she hissed, and a second later he came bursting through to the small concrete landing. She was already halfway up the steps. “En haut!” she whispered and, not waiting to see how he responded, turned and ran harder than she had ever run in her life.

He was behind and gaining on her. They were halfway up the next flight when they heard someone crash through the door below. They froze, and listened as the others went thundering down the steps to the lower floors.

Mariel breathed a prayer of gratitude, then crept up the last steps and through the door into the fourth-floor hallway. The stranger understood that she was running to a known goal, and wasted no time on questions. She led him to the door marked Toilettes, in and past the basins, and into the last cubicle in the row.

She was up on the windowsill while Haroun was still half wondering if she had led him into a trap after all. But with a flash of thighs she leapt through the window, and he was quick to follow.

“Close it,” she hissed. “And go carefully, this thing is not very safe. Stay a few feet behind me and keep as close as you can to the wall, or it may come down.”

He slid the window down and after giving her a head start followed her along the tottery fire escape, wondering if it would hold his weight. Ahead of him she turned and went down one flight, then paused. To his amazement, though nothing amazed him anymore, she hoisted herself up onto a windowsill.

He caught up with her. “Let us get down to the ground,” he hissed.

“It doesn’t lead anywhere—it’s been destroyed lower down,” she said, swinging her entrancingly naked legs over the sill. He hesitated for a moment. Suppose he had walked into an elaborate setup?

But now he could see that she had told him the truth—the fire escape simply stopped two flights up from the ground. No way to leap that without serious damage.

She had disappeared through the window. Haroun shrugged and, with a murmured “La howlah wa la quwwata illa billah,” followed her into the unknown.

And found himself in a hotel bedroom lighted only by a night-light. She was standing by the bed. A red velour bedspread covered it. She was tossing two red velour pillows onto the floor as he entered. He watched as she tore the bedspread down to the foot of the bed, dragged back the sheets.

Her black leather skirt was slit up both sides, and revealed black lace covering a neatly rounded rump as she bent and twisted, intent on her work.

He could appreciate such insouciant dedication to business, and only regretted that he could not share it. He wanted to get the hell out of here.

But he couldn’t help smiling. He crossed towards the outer door as she straightened. “I wish I could stay,” he murmured, “but unfortunately…”

“Shhh!” she commanded. She now had the bed looking completely ruined, and pushed him out of her way as she crossed to the window. She dragged it shut and turned the little locking mechanism, then drew the curtains.

“Right,” she said. “Now, look—Henri will think you’re my client.”

“Henri?”

“Downstairs, on the desk,” she supplied impatiently. “Can you—” She looked at him, taking in his clothes fully for the first time. “My God, you look like a cat burglar!” she exclaimed.

He was dressed entirely in snug-fitting black that outlined his body almost as closely as Lycra. Mariel blinked at the muscled chest, the powerful thighs, the firm biceps….

He cocked one eyebrow. “I am a cat burglar,” he said dryly.

“I have to go down the front way, and there’s no time to show you the service entrance. You’ll just have to come out with me. Henri will think you are my client who doesn’t want to be recognized, so he won’t be surprised if you go straight out the door.”

“And then what?”

“My car is in the next street. Can I drop you, or shall we go our separate ways?”

She was so cool! Haroun reached to touch her chin, and laughed with pure admiration. “I don’t think I can leave you,” he said. “Let us change our minds and at least make use of the bed before we part.”

His words made her lips twitch into an involuntary smile. It was quite true that sex was in the air between them. How could it not be, when danger had chased so closely at their heels? For those who are truly alive, their bodies and spirits cried, a near escape from death is best celebrated through sex.

Mariel could almost have given in, too. He was so handsome, and when he was laughing he was pretty well irresistible. And she had fallen half in love just with his photo. But—

“You are ridiculous,” she said sternly, though she knew he wasn’t serious. “Anyway, we’ve been incredibly lucky so far and our luck would be sure to turn if we abused it like that.”

He was eyeing her with a grin that melted her. “I certainly don’t want the luck I’ve been having tonight to change. If we make love now, it will abandon me? You are sure of it? I think it could only improve. And perhaps it would even be wise to wait here until the search is given up.”

“No, let’s get out of here,” Mariel said, ignoring most of the speech. “We can’t be sure Michel doesn’t know about that fire escape.”

He was aware of a reluctance to leave her. He justified this with the conviction that she might be able to tell him something about Verdun that he didn’t know.

“All right. We head for your car. Where is it, exactly? What make and colour?”

She told him in an undervoice as she opened the door and led him out into the hall. He went down the stairs lightly at her side, his lithe black shape melting in and out of the shadows. She could believe he was a cat burglar, but what had he wanted from Michel? Was it possible he was stealing secrets from Michel and selling them?

Henri was too savvy to take any formal notice of the sudden appearance of Emma’s “client,” and Mariel only threw him a smile and a twinkling wave before following the stranger out into the street.

Her car was two streets away, and there was plenty of pedestrian traffic under the neon signs. Mariel walked quickly, her high-heeled boots clicking on the pavement with little erotic snaps. She resisted the impulse to look over her shoulder to be sure the stranger was following, and instead tried to concentrate on looking like a woman on the job. She slipped her fingers into the little slash pockets of her micromini and let her hips swing in invitation. She kept wanting to laugh, and she couldn’t tell whether it was the effect danger had on her, or the stranger.

At the corner she turned to cross the street and risked a glance back. Two women were offering their wares to him, jointly and severally, and they didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer. Her smile died as a totally unfamiliar jealous rage swept through her.

She had whirled instinctively, ready to charge back towards the cosy little group, almost before she realized it. Then she took a deep, surprised breath. She had never been jealous before, and here she was, furiously proprietal about a man whose photograph she had first seen less than an hour ago! Was she going crazy?

Maybe it was just the effect of the danger. Danger heightened the emotions, she had always heard that. But still she stood glaring down the street as he smiled his regrets and passed the hungry hookers by. One of them glanced up and saw Mariel staring, saw that the man was following her, and started screaming at her in very pungent street French.

“Get off my beat, putain!”

“Va-t’en, vache!” Mariel called back, partly for the hell of it, and partly to stay in character in case anyone was watching.

Perhaps a little too much in character. The two hookers erupted with fury at her show of defiance and took after her. Fortunately the light had changed. Mariel ran across the busy street, followed by the cat burglar, who was followed by the two enraged women.

People in cars began to honk encouragement as the drama unfolded in front of them. And on the opposite side of the street, a block behind, she saw Michel’s gunman turn the corner, take one look in their direction, and instantly join the chase.

Maybe she should have sacrificed a little of the character of her part, Mariel reflected. No one ever ran the four-minute mile in three-inch stilettos, she was pretty sure of that.

The cat burglar caught up with her, grabbed her arm and kept running. This caused the hookers to scream like wounded banshees, but a glance showed her they at least were losing interest in the chase. Maybe she had crossed the frontier of their territory now.

The man with the gun, which he was now obviously holding in the pocket of his sweats, wasn’t losing interest. He was pounding along, barely a block behind.

Fortunately, her car was around the next corner. Breathless, Mariel could only point wildly to the right as they approached the next street. The cat burglar understood and, keeping his grip on her arm, half dragged her into the turn.

Her car was halfway along the narrow, dark street. Mariel reached for her backpack, then gave vent to a breathless screech.

“What?” said the stranger.

“My bag!” she panted. “I left—my bag—no—no—keys!”

“Where?”

“In the—office,” Mariel croaked.

Luck, she had called it? Where was the luck in escaping if Michel knew who had been there?

Three

They had slowed their steps, but now they heard the sounds of running footsteps behind them, and the stranger grabbed her arm again and set off across the street at an angle. She just saw the shadow of the mouth of the alley before they were in it.

It was pitch-dark, and their entry was the trigger for some frantic scuffling near some piles of refuse. Mariel hoped it wasn’t rats.

The cat burglar seemed to have eyes as good as his namesake, because he led her safely through the alley past all impediments before her own eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. When they got to the other end a glance behind showed them the gunman framed at the entrance. A moment later they heard clanging and cursing, so his eyes weren’t as good as the stranger’s, either.

They crossed another narrow street and plunged into another laneway. They were in a very old part of the city, the walls all worn, dark brick, the streets twisting and narrow. But the other, though he wasn’t gaining, managed to stick on their tail.

Mariel was panting heavily when the stranger dragged her into another narrow opening. Now she could hear a pounding like thunder. The drum of doom, she thought a moment later. Because this time the lane led into a cramped courtyard, and there was no other exit.

“Oh my God!” Mariel panted. “Is there a fire esc—”

A sound from the stranger silenced her. He was staring around in the darkness, and now pressed his finger lightly to her lips. “This way,” he whispered in her ear.

It was only then that she saw the little group of teenage boys clustered around a doorway, deep in shadow, murmuring amongst themselves. The stranger’s confident hand clasped her wrist and drew her in that direction. Before Mariel had time to wonder, the door opened a crack, pushed from the inside, and music came pounding out.

The cat burglar leapt the last couple of feet and grabbed the door as the kids, glancing nervously at him, slipped through one by one. Mariel entered in their wake as the stranger held the door and prevented its closing. He followed her inside.

The music was loud and raucous, and that was nothing compared to the crowd. Mariel forgot all her troubles for a moment of wonder. Compared to what the women in here were wearing, her own outfit was a model of respectability. She had never seen so much big hair in her life, and the fingernails were longer than the skirts. And as for the eyes! Spiders were nothing to these women—most of them seemed to have tame lemurs on their lashes.