Night Of The Condor

She walked into the bedroom and threw herself across the bed, staring into space.

She had handled that confrontation badly, she knew, but learning of Evan’s disappearance like that had thrown her completely.

Her heart ached for Evan. She realised she hadn’t fully comprehended the problems and difficulties he had encountered at Atayahuanco, or the depth of his wretchedness, but meeting Rourke Martinez had made a great deal clear to her.

He had obviously realised that Evan was less than wholehearted about the project, and resented having him foisted on to it. But that wasn’t Evan’s fault, she thought angrily. If anyone was to blame, it was her father, who should have known he was asking the impossible.

And now Evan was heaven knows where with a mule and a few supplies. He could be lost. He could be injured, she thought, biting her lip savagely, as a pang of fear tore through her. He must have been really desperate to have taken such a risk, because none of his letters had expressed the slightest interest in exploring the hostile terrain around him.

That was, of course, if Evan had really gone off at all. She sat up abruptly. After all, she only had that abominable swine’s word for it, and who was to say he wasn’t simply following her father’s instructions to deter her.

Well, if her father thought she was going tamely back to Britain with her tail between her legs, he was mistaken. Come hell or high water, she was going to get to Atayahuanco somehow. She was going to check primarily whether Evan had really disappeared, and if so, to insist on a full-scale effort to find him.

Her lips curved in a brief cat-like smile. After all, Rourke Martinez was not the only arbiter on the project. There was Fergus Willard too. The Frazier name was bound to count for something with him. And if she managed to get his permission to make the trip to Atayahuanco, there would be nothing the Martinez man could do about it.

Or she could simply arrive there, she thought. It wouldn’t be an easy trip, but she couldn’t imagine she would be turned away once she had managed the journey.

She gave a determined nod. Tomorrow she would go to the Peruvian Quest offices and make radio contact with Fergus Willard. Once she had won him over, it would just be a question of hiring the best guide, and the best transport her money could obtain.

She squared her shoulders. But if she had to fight every battle alone, then she would do so. And Rourke Martinez—or anyone else for that matter—would not defeat her.

She swallowed suddenly, remembering with painful clarity those last contemptuous words he had flung at her.

I’ll make him sorry, she vowed silently. I’ll make him sorry he was ever born!

CHAPTER TWO

THE Peruvian Quest offices lay in a quiet side street.

Leigh stood for a moment, watching the cab which had brought her there drive off. She was sure she had been overcharged for such a comparatively modest journey, but there had been no meter in the cab for her to check with. No meter, and very little else that worked either, she thought with a kind of desperate hilarity, but most of the cabs she had seen cruising around had been in the same ramshackle state.

She wished she had taken up the hotel’s offer to hire a car for her. It would surely have been in better condition, and maybe the driver wouldn’t have looked like a brigand either, she thought with a slight shiver.

More than once, she had caught him staring insolently at her in his mirror, and he had tossed a couple of remarks at her which she hadn’t been able to understand, but which instinct warned her were of a frankly sexual nature.

Last night, in the hotel dining-room, she had been openly stared at as she tried to eat her meal, and one man from a party of four near the door had tried to accost her as she left. She had shaken him off with a blazing look, and gone straight to her room, abandoning any notion of seeing what facilities the hotel had to offer during the evenings.

Under the circumstances, she had slept quite well, but today she was aware of a slight persistent headache, no doubt a legacy from her long plane trip.

The garua still held the city in its clammy grip too, which was disappointing, and although it was very humid, she was beginning to wish she had brought some warmer clothes.

Leigh walked across the uneven paving-stones and tried the heavy outer door of the building. It opened at once, and she found herself in a narrow passage facing an old-fashioned lift. On her right was a rudimentary reception counter surmounted by a grille with an ornate bellpush. She rang and waited, but no one came, and after a brief hesitation, she decided to trust herself to the lift.

Gingerly, she closed the gate and pressed the button. The lift seemed to stir and shake itself like a grumpy animal being poked with a stick, then with a heart-stopping lurch it began its upward journey.

It stopped equally abruptly, nearly throwing her off balance, but she seemed to have arrived at the first floor, so she supposed she had to be grateful for small mercies.

The narrow passage seemed a facsimile of the one downstairs, except that the reception area had been replaced by a pair of double doors. It was plainly the sole option, so she knocked briefly and walked in.

She stopped dead. Just for a moment, it seemed as if the door led nowhere, and she had fallen off the edge of the world. Then she realised that what was confronting her was a gigantic aerial photograph of part of the Andes range. She caught her breath as she studied it. Savagely sculpted peaks reared towards the pale sky, intersected by gorges, and swooping down to the unimaginable depths of chasms where slender rivers ran. Some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, she had heard it said, and Evan—her Evan—was out there somewhere—alone.

She supposed Atayahuanco was somewhere in the photograph, hidden in the indigo shade of one of those deep valleys, and the realisation of what was facing her made her feel suddenly nauseated.

It wouldn’t have taken much to persuade her to forget the whole thing, she thought with a shudder. She was no climber. In fact she was hardly the outdoor type at all. And neither was Evan, she reminded herself.

She closed her eyes momentarily, taking a grip on herself. She loved Evan. She had endured their separation, and it would take more than a little physical hardship to keep him from her now.

She heard a polite cough, and opened her eyes to find a young woman neatly dressed in a dark skirt and white blouse standing looking at her enquiringly.

Leigh marshalled one of her few Spanish phrases. ‘Habla usted Inglés?’ she asked hopefully, and was rewarded by a nod and a smile.

‘I speak it well. How may I help you, señorita?’

Leigh decided not to beat about the bush. She said, ‘I understand you’re in radio contact with the camp at Atayahuanco. I was wondering if I could send a message through.’

The girl looked puzzled. ‘There is no radio here, señorita. We have another office in Cuzco, and all messages go from there. But the use of the radio is—restricted, I think.’

‘I’m sure it is.’ Leigh’s own smile didn’t slip. ‘But you see, I need to contact Doctor Willard urgently, and I don’t know any other way of doing it.’

The girl’s face cleared. ‘Doctor Willard? Ah, but that is not possible, señorita. Doctor Willard is ill with a fever. The camp is under the direction of Doctor Martinez, and he is here in Lima at this time. You may speak with him directly.’

Leigh groaned inwardly. ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any need for that,’ she said, trying to sound casual. ‘Actually, I was hoping to go to the camp, and I just wanted to warn someone that I was on my way, that’s all.’

The girl gaped at her. ‘Go—up to Atayahuanco?’ She shook her head. ‘Impossible.’

‘Hardly,’ said Leigh with determined amiability. ‘This—Doctor Martinez seems to manage it.’ She remembered something he’d said. ‘How do supplies go in? Isn’t there a helicopter, or something?’

‘Sí,señorita. But this month it has already made its trip.’

‘Then what do you suggest?’ Leigh asked.

The girl shrugged. ‘Me, I would not go,’ she said with total seriousness.

Leigh held on to her temper. ‘Doctor Martinez—how will he travel?’

The girl moved her shoulders again with growing reluctance. ‘From Cuzco, señorita, he goes by jeep, and later by mule. But then,’ she added, a disturbingly dreamy expression crossing her face, ‘Doctor Martinez is a man, and very strong, and altogether unafraid.’

‘And when he needs to cross a river, I suppose he walks on water,’ muttered Leigh. She saw the other girl looked astonished, and waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, let it pass.’ Her mind was moving rapidly, weighing the various possibilities, and realising with increasing foreboding that the most direct route to Atayahuanco, little though she might relish it, lay in the company of the loathsome Martinez man.

And, of course, he’s so likely to welcome me as a travelling companion, she thought despondently. If I’d known, I might have been nicer to the pig.

As it was, she seemed to have burned her boats pretty comprehensively where he was concerned.

Or had she?

She gritted her teeth. ‘Is Doctor Martinez here?’

The girl glanced at her watch. ‘He is expected, señorita, but when it is impossible to say, you understand.’

‘Well, I’ll wait for a while, if that’s all right.’

‘As you wish.’ The girl indicated a high-backed chair near the window, and offered coffee which Leigh declined. She withdrew then to some inner office, and Leigh could hear the sound of a typewriter through the closed door.

By the time an hour and a half had passed, she felt she could have drawn the aerial photograph from memory, and answered questions on it too.

But she had had time to plan the next stage in her campaign.

Bitter as gall though it was, she was going to have to make some kind of peace with Rourke Martinez.

She shouldn’t have allowed his overt hostility to get to her, she thought. She should have realised he could be useful and set out to charm him from the outset. She knew, without particular vanity, that she could have done it. She had been helping her shy mother to entertain important business clients for years, and they had not always been easy to deal with either. Yet she had invariably managed, and more than managed.

‘Leigh could charm birds from trees,’ Justin Frazier was wont to say proudly.

Well, she would just have to charm Rourke Martinez, she thought calmly. It could be done. Even while he had been slagging her off, he had been aware of her as a woman. She knew that, and at the time it had simply fuelled her resentment of him, but now, she acknowledged, she could turn it to her advantage maybe.

She would have to apologise sweetly, she thought, grinding her teeth. Tell him helplessly that jet-lag always affected her temper. She would have to flatter him, of course. No man with his brand of dynamic good looks could be without his share of sexual vanity. It might even be—amusing to let him fancy her a little. To let him think she could be—interested herself.

She had done it before, she thought with a little inward giggle. There wasn’t a man alive who couldn’t be conned into thinking he was irresistible.

She would have to be discreet about it, of course. The journey to Atayahuanco would be fraught enough without having to fight off unwanted advances from her guide.

With new determination, she knocked at the door of the inner office. It opened almost at once, and the girl looked at her enquiringly.

‘Sí,señorita? You are having a long wait, I think.’

‘I think so too,’ Leigh said briskly. ‘It might be better to leave Doctor Martinez a note, if you can give me a sheet of paper and an envelope.’

The note took a lot of thinking about. She wanted it to sound reasonably enticing, without actually grovelling to the creature.

‘Dear Doctor Martinez,’ she wrote at last, ‘I feel we got off on the wrong foot yesterday. May I make amends by inviting you to have dinner with me at my hotel either tonight or tomorrow? I expect to be out for the rest of the day, but a message left at reception will be quite sufficient.’ She added, ‘Sincerely yours’ and her signature, and looked at her handiwork with satisfaction. That should bring him, if only out of curiosity.

And by the time dinner was over, she would have him eating out of her hand, she thought, smiling to herself, sealing the envelope as if she were sealing his fate with it.

Leigh could not have said she thoroughly enjoyed her sightseeing that day. Armed with a guide book, she dutifully toured the Plaza de Armes, stared into the swirling waters of the Rimac from the Bridge of Stones, and recoiled, shuddering, from the mummified remains of the great conquistador Francisco Pizarro, preserved ghoulishly in a glass case in the Cathedral.

She wasn’t sure she approved of Pizarro. Everything she had ever read about the Inca civilisation suggested it had worked perfectly well without outside interference. But the gold which they took so much for granted had lured the conquerors and plunderers from the Old World, and the Spaniards had overthrown the Inca Atahualpa by a trick, then held him to ransom. But the riches of his kingdom, which his bewildered people had brought in load after weary load, were not enough to save him. Pizarro, having sworn not one drop of his blood should be spilled, kept his word by having the Inca strangled.

It was not, Leigh thought with distaste, an uplifting story, and it seemed only fitting that a few years later Pizarro should have been betrayed and murdered by his own men.

But her mind wasn’t really on Peru’s savage history. Over and over again, she found herself thinking about Rourke Martinez, trying to gauge his reaction to her note.

She supposed his most likely response would be to ignore her completely. But I’ll worry about that when it happens, she thought.

And much as she hated to admit it, she was beginning to realise that Lima might not be a safe city for a woman on her own. She was attracting all kinds of unwelcome attention. She could deal with the normal range of wolf whistles and goodhumoured sexual innuendo, but the kind of macho aggression her slender fairness seemed to be inciting was altogether outside her scope. Over-loud remarks accompanied by blatantly lecherous gestures, made her face burn, and she decided to abandon her plan to visit some of the city’s museums, almost running the remaining blocks back to her hotel.

To her amazement, when she asked without much hope if there were any messages, the clerk handed her a folded paper.

‘Dear Miss Frazier,’ his letter read, ‘Your olive branch is accepted. I’m afraid tonight is the only night I can manage, as my time in Lima is strictly limited. Shall we say eight o’clock?’ His signature was as uncompromising as the man himself, she noted ruefully.

But she could feel glee welling up inside her just the same.

As simple as that, she thought in self-congratulation. She said to the reception clerk, ‘Would you send the maître d’hotel to my suite right away, please. I wish to entertain a guest privately there to dinner tonight.’

The clerk stared at her. ‘But our dining-room is excellent, señorita, and tonight there will be a musical show with folk dancing which you and your guest will enjoy.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Leigh in a tone which brooked no argument. ‘My—guest and I have business to discuss which requires peace and privacy, so please do as I have asked.’

As she rode up in the lift, she re-read his note. So his time in Lima was limited. Did that mean he was going back to Atayahuanco very soon? It seemed more than likely.

But what he didn’t realise, she told herself pleasurably, her nails curling into the palms of her hands, was that she would be going with him.

She devoted the rest of the afternoon to relaxing and getting ready, smoothing away any ragged edges with a leisurely session with the hairdresser and manicurist in the hotel’s beauty salon.

Dressing that evening, she subjected her wardrobe to minute scrutiny before deciding what to wear. She felt rather like a general planning some spring offensive. And it was, she thought, definitely time for the big guns!

Her silky black dress relied for its effect on the chic and daring of its cut. It moulded itself lovingly to her slim figure before breaking out into a brief swirl of a skirt, and the halternecked bodice, although reasonably demure at the front, plunged well below her waist at the back.

She fixed delicate gold spirals in her ears, and added a discreet misting of Hermès, before deciding she would do.

Rourke Martinez, she thought smiling, would not know what had hit him.

The telephone rang promptly at eight.

‘Your guest is here, señorita,’ an expressionless voice told her.

‘I’ll come down,’ said Leigh. ‘Ask him to wait for me in the bar, por favor.’

She took a deep breath, as she gave herself a final considering survey in the long mirror. Black shoes with slender, spiked heels and pale stockings with embroidered seams completed her ensemble, and her hair gleamed like silk.

She thought, I look like a woman going to meet her lover, and the realisation stopped her in her tracks. For the first time, she felt a qualm about her plans for the evening, then she squared her slender shoulders, lifting her chin defiantly. However loathsome she might find it having to play up to a man like Rourke Martinez, it would be worth it, if it meant she found Evan at last.

And after the way Rourke Martinez had treated her, it would be amusing to see if she could make him grovel, even for a short while.

She caused a minor sensation as she entered the bar, but she would have enjoyed it more if she hadn’t been working so hard to conceal her own nervousness.

She saw him at once, of course. He was head and shoulders taller than anyone else around, standing at the bar, with his back to her. Then as if alerted by the sudden hush which had descended at her entrance, he wheeled slowly, glass in hand, and looked at her.

He looked—arrested anyway, Leigh thought as she pinned on a cordial smile, and crossed the space which separated them.

‘Doctor Martinez.’ Her voice was warm to match her smile. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.’

‘If you did,’ he said slowly, ‘you are undeniably worth waiting for, Miss Frazier. Is this solely in my honour, or are you expecting other company?’

‘But I don’t know anyone else in Lima.’ Leigh lowered darkened lashes demurely.

‘Of course,’ he drawled. ‘I was forgetting. May I get you a drink?’

She shrugged. ‘Whatever you’re having will be fine.’

His brows rose faintly. ‘I’m having a pisco sour, but I should warn you, they can be potent.’

‘When in Rome,’ Leigh said lightly. ‘Shall we sit down?’

It was working, she thought, as she reached into her bag for a tissue she didn’t need. The stark uncovered blackness of the dress against her pale skin was a surefire winner. He could hardly take his eyes off her. Obviously blondes in model gowns were in short supply in the wilds of Atayahuanco. Well, let him eat his heart out.

Although she had to admit, as he brought the drinks to their table, that he didn’t look like a man who would ever go short of female company, except through his own choice.

He was more formally dressed this evening, in a pale, lightweight suit with a dark blue silk shirt. And if she was the cynosure of all the masculine eyes in the bar, she could not deny that he was being surveyed with discreet avidity by the women.

Not that she could altogether blame them, she thought unwillingly. However much she might dislike him, she had to acknowledge that he was an attractive devil, and magnetically virile as well. And not lacking in charm either, she supposed, when he chose to exert it.

Smilingly, she lifted her glass to him. ‘To our better understanding, Doctor Martinez.’

His expression was enigmatic as he returned the toast. ‘Salud, Miss Frazier.’

Leigh tasted her drink with a certain amount of caution. There was a tang of lemon, she recognised, and underneath it all, a kick like a mule. One, she thought, would undoubtedly be enough.

‘So—how are you enjoying Lima?’ he asked.

Polite conversation, it seemed, was the order of the day, and Leigh obediently picked up her cue.

‘Interesting, but it has its drawbacks,’ she said lightly. ‘This constant mist, for one thing.’

‘Ah, the garua.’ He grinned slightly. ‘Legend has it that when the Spaniards asked the conquered Incas where was the best place to build their city, the Incas recommended Lima with deliberate malice.’

She laughed. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me. But, after all, it wasn’t Lima I came to see.’

‘I suppose not,’ he said smoothly, but across the table, the topaz eyes met hers in a clash like the ring of swords between two duellists. Leigh had to smother a slight gasp, but she forced herself to go on smiling.

‘I feel I haven’t had a chance to see the real Peru,’ she went on.

‘Lima is real enough,’ he said. ‘You’d be well advised to use your return ticket, Miss Frazier. Juanita at Peruvian Quest will help if there’s any problem over the flight.’

Leigh sipped her drink, smiling coolly. ‘Oh, I’m not ready to cut short my trip yet awhile. This dreadful mist can’t last for ever, and I haven’t seen Cuzco yet—or Machu Picchu. I hear that’s really spectacular.’

He finished his drink, and set down the glass. ‘Well, as long as you stick to the recognised tourist trails with an organised party, you won’t come to too much harm. Now, would you like another drink, or shall we have dinner? There’s a good place on the Carretera Central I thought I’d show you.’

Leigh put down her own empty glass. ‘It sounds fascinating, but I’ve already arranged dinner, here in my suite.’ She watched him digest this, then added sweetly, ‘After all, I invited you—remember?’

His eyes swept over her in a lingering, frankly disturbing appraisal. ‘I’m not likely to forget,’ he said. ‘And I’m still wondering why.’

‘To make amends—build bridges,’ Leigh said calmly. She gave him a brilliant smile. ‘After all, there’s no need for us to be bad friends, Doctor Martinez. We’re on the same side.’

‘Are we, Miss Frazier?’ he asked softly. ‘I think I might need some convincing of that.’

‘Well, the night is young.’ Leigh rose to her feet. ‘So—shall we go up and eat?’

Her face was serene as she led the way to the lift, but at the same time she was aware of a distinct frisson of uneasiness. Rourke Martinez, she thought, was still proving a formidable opponent, although she thought she might be ahead on points—just.

She shook herself. She couldn’t start losing her nerve now. He was a man, and capable of being manipulated like any other. And she had been adept at that kind of manipulation since her cradle.

There was no reason, no reason at all to think that this time she might have met her match.

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