Undercover Sultan

One or two of them were eyeing the stranger’s snug black get-up with extremely frank approval. “Chéri!” said one, her popping eyes rivetted to his groin.

“He’s a cat burglar!” Mariel told her waspishly. Since in French the phrase for cat burglar was mount-in-the-air, she received some wide-eyed looks of envy and approval.

“I believe you! Comme elle a de la chance!” a big, dark-eyed blonde cried, one wrist to her forehead in an excess of sensibility, faking a faint. “My dears!”

Mariel was starting to smell a rat.

But it was only when a clone from The Wild Ones, Marlon Brando from the black biker’s cap down to the chain boots, groped her own butt, crying, “My God, you are so subtle! I love subtlety!” that the penny finally dropped.

“Thank you!” she muttered, as the cat burglar grabbed her hand again and started beating a path to the entrance door across the room.

“What are you drinking?” Brando shouted over the din.

“Scotch?” Mariel called hopefully, because she sure could use a drink.

Brando looked delighted. “I’ll be right back! Wait for me! Don’t disappear!”

She smiled helplessly at him as the stranger, still ruthlessly grasping her wrist, dragged her through the crush of dancing, gyrating male bodies.

“I’m pooped! Can’t we stop for a quick drink?” she pleaded, as they arrived at the edge of the crowd a few feet from the door.

A large and burly bouncer was evicting the three blue-jeaned kids who had entered through the back door with them. “We only wanted to watch!” one was protesting.

The stranger stared at her disbelievingly. “A drink?”

“Marlon Brando over there offered me a scotch. I sure could use something. And let’s face it, the way we’re dressed, Michel would never find us in here.”

He grabbed her wrist again without answering and set off. The bouncer watched incuriously as they ran out past him and up the steps of the areaway. They emerged on a broad boulevard with plenty of traffic, where a taxi screeched to a stop almost before the stranger lifted his hand.

They scrambled in, and Mariel fell back against the upholstery, half panting, half laughing. It was only as she heard the stranger murmur “Le Charlemagne” that she realized she had missed the moment for separating. They ought to have said goodbye and each taken a separate cab.

“Is that your address?” she asked.

“But of course,” he said, so blandly she didn’t know whether to believe him.

“I think we should separate now,” she said, though her heart wasn’t in it. As the lights of Paris flickered past, light and shadow falling over their faces in a strange tempo, she gazed into his face and felt suddenly that she was in a dream. A dream she had dreamt a thousand times before without ever quite remembering.

“Separate?” he repeated, in soft protest. “Ah, no, ma petite, I cannot be separated from you yet.” He bent over her, where she lay slouched down against the cushions, his face close. Her pulse hammered a protest. She lifted a hand to his chest, whether to hold him off or draw him closer, even she didn’t know. His lips moved closer.

“Stay with me tonight,” he murmured.

This was the handsomest man in the world talking to her. Mariel’s heart did a shaky back flip. Lust struggled with common sense, which reminded her that she didn’t even know his name. And that he might well be in the enemy camp. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, her heart protested, but common sense told her she couldn’t be certain that he was Michel’s enemy.

“I think I should get out,” she murmured, half to herself. “Driver—” she called, but the stranger put his fingers to her lips to silence her.

“Where will you go?”

“Home, of course.”

He shook his head. “Without your handbag? Where are your keys?”

“The landlady will let me in, and I have a spare key hidden.”

“What besides your keys was in the bag?”

She was trying to remember where she had left the bag. She ran over those moments in the office—she had been picking up her bag when she noticed the open door of the secret office. And she had gone to close the office door. Had she left the bag on her desk, or taken it with her and dropped it in her scuffle with the stranger?

If she had left it on her desk there was just a faint possibility that Michel might think she had left her bag behind when she left for the night. If she had dropped it in his secret office…

She shook her head. “Just what you’d imagine. My credit cards, money…address book, phone numbers—everything.”

What a fool. And all because she had fallen for a face in a photograph. If she hadn’t had complete brain collapse and decided to print that photograph, none of it would have happened. She would probably have been out of the office before the man even arrived.

Haroun watched her. He was aware of too many contradictions. Why was Michel Verdun chasing a lady of the night with an armed man in tow? What had she been doing in his office if she wasn’t there at his invitation?

“And what of this man? When he finds your handbag with your address—will he make you a visit?”

Mariel shivered. Not before she had gathered her belongings and disappeared, she hoped. She had money in the flat. She would take her things to a hotel and phone Hal for instructions.

He noted the shiver. “What were you doing there?” he demanded.

She looked up at him through ridiculously long lashes, her eyes wary, challenging, but still somehow seductive and, as he expected, parried. “What were you?”

He laughed and lifted a hand, palm facing her, in a sign of surrender. “Eh bien, d’accord!” he said. “We ask no personal questions. Do you think the gun was for me or for you?”

He was looking at her with a devil-may-care glint in his eyes and tilt to his lips that made her heart kick again. She pressed her own lips together and lowered her head.

“I don’t know. You can’t have tripped the alarm, because I turned it off. Maybe he’s had something new installed I don’t know about.”

His eyebrow went up. “You are familiar with his operation?”

“No personal questions, remember?”

“When you saw me, you said, It’s you. And then, Michelle is sick, so if you don’t mind briefing me—”

He looked at her enquiringly, but she only shook her head. He frowned in thought. “Michel!” he exclaimed, looking enlightened. “Ah! I imagined Michelle was a girl you replaced, but you meant—Verdun himself. You thought I was there to meet Verdun, you were playing for time, is that right?”

She pressed her lips together and looked at him. Everything about him seemed to have a glow. His dark eyes, his waving hair, his warm skin. His whole being.

When she made no answer he went on thinking aloud. “And yet you were there to…”

He paused invitingly. They were driving further away from her own arrondissement as they talked. She came out of a kind of daze to realize she was still half lying against the upholstery and he was still bent over her in intimate closeness. Mariel pushed the stranger aside and sat up with a small tug of regret for the loss of the sensual little cocoon she had been inhabiting.

“I want to go home,” she said. “Would you mind paying…?”

“No emergency funds tucked into the top of your stocking?” he asked with a teasing smile, his finger tracing designs on her knee as she pretended not to be affected by the chills charging through her blood and reproved him with a look. “But no—no stockings at all.”

“I’ve got to go home,” she repeated. She leaned forward and murmured the name of a landmark near her apartment, and the driver pulled into a turn with an easy shrug.

It would be safe enough as long as she didn’t let the stranger know her exact address, and she wouldn’t be there past tonight anyway. The stranger wasn’t a man who would feel the loss of fifty francs, not if he was calling Le Charlemagne home.

“And are we never to see each other again?” he continued, in a tone that wrenched at her heart.

Of course he didn’t mean it. And neither did she—it had been just a crazy moment when she thought she had fallen in love with the photograph.

The photograph! Mariel bit her lip. She hadn’t thought about that….

“What is it?” he murmured, noting her sudden change of mood, the delicious way her white teeth caught her lower lip as she looked at him. “You have changed your mind? You will come with me?”

Should she warn the stranger about the fact that Michel had been sent his photograph? But she knew nothing about him or his motives, another part of her argued. She couldn’t tell him about the photo without exposing some part of her work. Suppose the stranger were actually in league with Michel, but double-crossing him? She now had to engage in damage limitation, and keep from Michel any clues as to who she was working for and how and what information she had been getting. She had to avoid anything that would confirm a suspicion that Hal Ward had got access to his top-secret computers.

For all she knew, the whole thing had been a setup. Maybe Michel had been clocking her visits for weeks. Maybe he had sent the stranger to pretend to be breaking in, too. Then followed it up with a raid, forcing her into the same camp as the stranger, making him an ally.

But still she felt guilty, not saying anything.

“Anyway,” she murmured aloud, “it’s all your fault I’m in this predicament.”

“C’est vrai,” the stranger replied, with a warm look. “So it is up to me to take care of you, no?”

And always that devil in his eyes, a look that made her shiver with delight. In a life with him you’d always be laughing, her heart suggested.

“I don’t think it works that way,” she said mildly.

“Si,” he contradicted her. “Tu verras.”

And she did see, sooner than either of them could have expected. On his way to the landmark she had named, the taxi driver took the usual route along the street where she lived, and as they passed the small, charming nineteenth-century building with blue shutters and blue wrought iron, she saw a car parked right in front of it. She sat up with a jerk, staring across the stranger’s relaxed body out the window. Michel’s car, she saw, as they drew close enough to read the plate.

A man sat at the wheel, smoking. He glanced over into the taxi just as the streetlight illumined the interior.

“Dieu!” Mariel murmured, and to recover from her unprofessional behaviour—she should never have stared out the window like that—tilted her head as if to kiss the stranger.

His arms instantly encircled her and he looked delighted. “Ah, you have had a change of heart, ma petite,” he observed, his lips close and parting hungrily.

“That’s one of Michel’s operatives in that parked car back there,” she whispered, her mouth barely an inch from his. With extreme reluctance, since she liked being right where she was, she lifted her head to peer through the back window.

“Is he following us?” the stranger asked from beneath her, amusement still threading his voice. His closeness tickled her throat and made her yearn.

The car stayed where it was. “No,” she murmured. “Do you think someone is right in my fl—?” she began, then gasped as, one hand on her back, the other on her head, the stranger pulled her down.

Suddenly he was kissing her, with an expertise that exploded into sugared sweetness all through her body. Sensation seemed to arise from nowhere to engulf her, drowning her so that she could not resist.

There had never been a kiss like it since the beginning of the world, Mariel thought dreamily, letting herself sink down against him. She thrilled as his arms tightened possessively around her, his kiss becoming hungrier, more demanding.

Her hands went to his face, her fingers slipping around his neck, as all her blood sang with delight. It was the kiss she had dreamed of, a kiss to die for, her fogged brain murmured, her body promised. It was the cake she could both have and eat.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of kiss.

“Et maintenant, mes enfants, où irions-nous? La Tour d’Eiffel?”

They surfaced to discover themselves in front of the monument Mariel had named, the driver calmly slipping a Gauloises between his lips as he tolerantly watched them over the seat back. The meter was still ticking.

The stranger smiled, touched her lips with a tender finger, and murmured, “Verdun’s car was parked at your address?”

She nodded.

“Well, then, you can’t return there, it is too dangerous. You must trust yourself to me now.”

Since for the moment she really could see no other option, Mariel was silent. The stranger lifted his head. “Le Charlemagne, s’il vous plait,” he said again.

With an expressively Gallic shrug, the driver lifted a cheap plastic lighter to his cigarette, flicked it to flame, drew deep, tossed it down onto the seat beside him, put the car in gear, and set it rolling.

“You really live in Le Charlemagne?” she asked, even more curious now about his reasons for breaking in to Michel’s office.

The stranger misunderstood. “Yes. There is little reason for Verdun to know my face, even if he saw me long enough for recognition, which I am sure he did not. The office was, in any case, nearly dark. So I think we will be safe enough there.”

The thought of the print of the photograph she had dropped somewhere surfaced in her mind. She wondered what Michel would make of it. It was proof that someone had broken in to his computers, but he must be wondering why anyone would have taken a hard copy.

“In spite of our no-questions policy it may be that the time has come for us to move on a step in intimacy,” the stranger remarked, interrupting her train of thought. “What is your name?”

She hesitated. “Emma. What’s yours?”

“Emma,” he repeated. “A charming name. And I am called…Fred.”

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