Pirate: A Thriller Read online

  Christ, what a stew.

  The Taiwan Strait, between the People’s Republic of China on the mainland and that offshore thorn in her side, Taiwan, was as dangerous a stretch of water as there was; it, rather than the Gulf, got Hawke’s vote as the place most likely to spark a world war in years to come. Not that anyone in the Admiralty was asking his opinion. He wasn’t paid for his geopolitical savvy. He was in Gibraltar for the briefing solely at Kelly’s request. There was, the director said, a new assignment. A matter of some urgency, he said.

  As his dear friend, Ambrose Congreve of Scotland Yard, had observed on numerous occasions, it was simply cloak-and-dagger time again. This notion, the prospect of his immediate assignment, a hostage rescue, soon had a salutary effect on his mood. Hawke had always found the classic covert snatch to be one of life’s more rewarding endeavors. The former hostage’s appreciative smiles upon rescue were priceless reminders of why one played the game.

  This particular hostage was exceptionally lucky. According to Kelly, only the actions of an alert station chief in Marrakech had alerted the Americans that one of their own was in trouble. He’d been stepping out of his car at La Mamounia just as a drunk was being loaded into the rear of a black sedan. The drunk looked American, the two men “helping” him were Chinese. Sensing something was amiss, the station chief jumped back into his car and followed the sedan for hours, all the way to the harbor at Casablanca.

  Armed guards at the foot of the gangway made intervention impossible, and he’d watched helplessly as the unconscious man was hauled up the gangplank of the Star of Shanghai. He’d called Langley immediately. His suspicions were confirmed. The drunk was likely one of their own all right, due out of China a week ago and presumed dead.

  Feeling much rejuvenated (driving at speed also worked wonders), Alex Hawke found himself grinning foolishly after only an hour or so behind the wheel. The sun was shining, his recently restored C Type was screaming along the Grand Corniche straightaway at 130 mph, and, for the moment, all was right with his world. His two hands firmly positioned at quarter to three, Hawke relished the notion that he was officially back in the game.

  A sign marker flashed by: Ste. Tropez. Only a few hours from his destination, the old resort at Cannes. Executing a racing change down into second gear, going quite quickly into a built-up S-bend, Hawke inhaled deeply.

  Provence was delightful in June. Glorious. Somewhere, bees were buzzing. He’d always felt a certain kinship with bees. After all, were they not similarly employed? Zipping around all day, doing the queen’s work, ha?

  Indeed.

  Spring itself was in the air. Not to mention the scented vapors of hot Castrol motor oil wafting back from one’s long, louvered bonnet. Good stuff. The feeling of raw power as one smashed one’s shoe to the floorboard and, whilst exiting a descending-radius curve, hearing the throaty roar of the naturally aspirated 4.4-liter XK Straight-Six responding beautifully. He’d been listening to the newly rebuilt motor carefully all day and had yet to hear any expensive noises.

  Nor did he, until he arrived in Cannes and checked into the fabled Carlton and heard the chap at Reception say how much his bloody seaside suite would cost him per night.

  Chapter Two

  Hampstead Heath

  AMBROSE CONGREVE LAVISHED A DOLLOP OF TIPTREE’S LITTLE scarlet strawberry preserve onto his warm toast and held it up for closer inspection. Satisfied, he contemplated the two three-minute eggs in their Minton blue china cups with unbridled relish and a shudder of warm satisfaction. Songbirds trilled outside his sunny windows and the teapot was whistling merrily on the Aga. To say that Ambrose was enjoying his early breakfast in the sunny conservatory of his new house would be gross understatement.

  It was pure, unadulterated bliss.

  Moments precisely like this one, the legendary New Scotland Yard criminalist reflected, had been the stuff of keen anticipation for lo these many months.

  Just as there had been times, shivering with damp cold in his drear little Bayswater flat of many years, that he’d never dared dream these happy domestic circumstances might ever come to pass.

  His present situation, newly acquired, was a lovely brick-and-stone cottage in Hampstead Heath. The house proper, and some of the outbuildings, had been bombed almost into extinction by the Nazis during the Blitz. It had been the property of his late aunt, Augusta. The dear woman had spent the last half of the century in a loving restoration of house and gardens completed just a few short months before her sudden death at age ninety-seven. Augusta had died peacefully in her sleep. Ambrose, standing at the graveside, had hoped this exit method ran in the family.

  Attending the reading of the late Mrs. Bulling’s last testament at her solicitor’s drab offices in Kensington High Street, Ambrose’s remorse had been tempered by the vain hope that he might inherit. There was, after all, a complete set of Minton china she’d promised him decades earlier, and he sat there feigning composure, hoping she’d not forgotten him.

  She had not.

  Rather, from the cold grave, Aunt Augusta had stunned all present by bequeathing Heart’s Ease cottage and the entirety of its contents to her dear nephew, Ambrose Congreve, instead of to her sole issue, her son, Henry Bulling. A stupefied silence descended upon the lawyer’s office. Henry Bulling, the assumed heir and a minor diplomat by trade, sat for some few moments in goggle-eyed shock, taking quick, shallow breaths. He shot Congreve a look that spoke volumes, all of which would have made for unpleasant reading, and then rose somewhat unsteadily on shaky pins and made for the door.

  The solicitor, a Mr. Reading, coughed into his fist once or twice and shuffled documents atop his large desk. There was a lavatory down the corridor and the door could be heard to slam loudly several seconds later. There was a muffled gargling noise, a retching actually, and the lawyer quickly resumed his reading. All ears were turned in his direction. There was a calico cat, Reading continued, apparently not well, which would be solely entrusted to Mrs. Bulling’s son, Henry. The cat, Felicity, and the princely sum of one thousand pounds.

  This current incident was just the latest in a long chain of disappointments for Henry. Ambrose had known him since birth. He was a boy who’d seemed positively doomed from the very beginning.

  Augusta’s only son was plainly one of life’s born unfortunates. A lackluster hank of orange hair lay atop his pate. He had not been blessed with the strong jawline and prominent chin that most Bulling men were known for leading with. He’d struggled in various public schools and been sent packing down from Cambridge for debauchery. Which is what they called in those days being discovered in a coat closet with a don’s wife in a compromising (and difficult to achieve) position.

  Born to Augusta in Bruges, by one of her husbands, a no-account count, a Belgian noble of some kind, Henry was a notorious layabout as a young man. It had gotten so bad that, at one point, Ambrose simply gave up on finding the boy a job he could hold for more than a month. Ambrose took to referring to his wastrel cousin as the “Belgian Loafer” after a shoe of that name. Actually, Ambrose thought the nickname did the eponymous shoe a disservice. The comfortable handmade shoes (a favorite of Congreve’s) were very stylish and wore quite well. Henry fit neither description.

  Migrating to Paris, Henry had spent a few years dabbling at the Sorbonne, and he had dabbled in the arts, too. Setting up his easel on the quay beside the storied and moody Seine, he had produced a series of dramatically large canvases that were, to Ambrose’s practiced artist’s eye, scenes of mindless violence.

  In the eighties, Henry Bulling lost a good portion of his mother’s money in the Lloyd’s debacle. Penniless, tail twixt the hindmost, he returned to his mother’s cottage in Hampstead Heath and moved into the small flat above the gardener’s shed. Later, he moved to an apparently rather unsavory place in town. He remained nonetheless an effete snob, in his cousin Ambrose’s opinion. His character was not enhanced by the faux French accent. Nor by the hundred-dollar pink Charvet shirts f
rom Paris he could ill afford on the clerk’s salary he earned at the French embassy in Knightsbridge.

  His role there was not an exalted one—he worked in transportation and trade relations—but he was in a small way useful to queen and country.

  Henry Bulling was a spy. He earned the odd extra shilling or two keeping an eye on things at the French delegation, reporting on a regular basis to the Yard. Since Ambrose was Henry’s first cousin, it fell to him to listen to the weekly gossip and examine the purloined copies of generally useless documents Bulling had secreted in his briefcase before leaving for lunch. It was Ambrose’s habit to meet his cousin on various random but prearranged benches throughout St. James’ Park. It wasn’t sly and sophisticated tradecraft, but it worked well enough.

  Congreve’s new housekeeper, May Purvis, a sturdy, sweet-faced Scotswoman from the Highlands, was bustling about in the adjacent kitchen. After breakfast, she would begin her daily rounds, plumping pillows, dusting and adjusting, keeping Heart’s Ease cottage pristine for her beneficent employer. Curiously enough, Mrs. Purvis was, at the moment, wallpapering his drawers. That is to say, carefully scissoring bits of floral and scenic Chinese toile wallpaper and placing them into the bottoms of all the cupboards and drawers in his new kitchen.

  May had a habit of whistling as she worked, and Ambrose found it quite cheery. She would pick up in the middle of a tune, stick with it for an hour or so, and then move on to some fresh melody in her seemingly inexhaustible repertoire. He watched her bustling about every morning and tried to imagine if this current scene was an accurate representation of married life. Cozy, tranquil, comforting. An idyll, in fact. Even Mrs. Purvis’s bashful smile as she hummed and hoovered was—well, he sometimes wondered if there might not be…someone, out there. His other half.

  He supposed not, or he would surely have found her by this stage of the game. He was, after all, on the wrong side of fifty.

  The happy detective bit into his slice of toast, heaved a sigh of contentment, and dove back into today’s Times. The economic news in Europe was grim. The cornerstones, Germany and France, were both reporting stagnant economies. France, amazingly enough, was pulling out of the EU! And it was rife with turmoil after another political assassination. There were sniffs of panic at EU headquarters in Brussels. Et cetera, et cetera, page after page. He sometimes wondered why he bothered with the damn newspapers. They were uniformly gloomy on a daily basis.

  But, to be sure, all was right with his world. His sunny little corner of it, at any rate. His musty old flat in Bayswater was already receding into the mists. In its place, this sturdy brick pile in the Georgian manner. A gabled slate roof with imposing chimneys standing sentry at either end, and a lovely fanlight over the front door. It was by no means a large house. No, it was small, but handsome. He had a few acres or so of sun-dappled grass and beds of peonies, lilies, and space, when he got around to it, to cultivate his beloved dahlias. Yes, an abundance of them. Polar Beauties, Golden Leaders, and his favorite, the Requiems.

  Everything in his life, it seemed, was brand new. His recently acquired dog, Ranger, a handsome Dutch Decoy Spaniel, lay puddled round his slippered feet, sleeping in the warm yellow sunlight. He had reached down to idly stroke the dog’s head when Ranger looked up suddenly and growled loudly.

  “Good lord, what on earth is that, Mrs. Purvis?” Ambrose sputtered.

  “What is what, Mr. Congreve?”

  There had come down the hall such a pounding and banging at the front door as ever you heard and yet the woman was blissfully unaware, snipping away at the blue Chinese toile paper.

  “That infernal pounding. At the front door, I believe. Is the bell out of commish?”

  “Let me find out, sir. Did the bell ring?”

  “Mrs. Purvis, please.”

  “I’m just going as fast as I can then, aren’t I, sir?”

  Ranger raced down the worn olive-green Axminster carpet of the hallway ahead of her, barking furiously. Congreve, nose buried in the Times, tried to ignore the muffled conversation coming from the front hall and concentrate on an article he was reading. Apparently, the bloody French were holding naval exercises with the Chinese. And it wasn’t the first time. This was the seventh. Something was clearly afoot with England’s irksome neighbors across the Channel. After years of trying to forge a united Europe, they seemed to be striking out on their own. It was a hoary tale, but a true one. Perhaps he’d lean on young Bulling a bit more heavily in future.

  “It’s two gentlemen to see you, sir,” Mrs. Purvis said, returning.

  “About what?”

  “Didn’t say, Mr. Congreve. Only that it was a matter of some urgency.”

  “Good lord, is there no escape?” Congreve said, getting to his feet and zipping up the wool jumper he’d slipped into against the early morning chill. “Tell them I’ll be right there, Mrs. Purvis. Invite them inside, offer tea, but keep an eye on them. And see if you can call off the dog, please. It wouldn’t do to have him bite a policeman.”

  “Policemen? How’d you come by that?”

  “I may have mentioned that I am a detective, Mrs. Purvis. It’s my nature to take a mystery and bend it to my will.”

  “But—”

  “Men in pairs, Mrs. Purvis, are always coppers.”

  “Or they may be a nice gay couple, mayn’t they be, Mr. Congreve?” she said, with a twinkle of her blue eyes.

  Chapter Three

  Cannes

  TONIGHT, THE TRAFFIC ALONG LE CROISETTE, THAT BROAD, palm-lined boulevard that hugs the shoreline of this normally glittering village, was minimal. It was fiendishly cold. A few desultory black Mercedes taxis cruised the big hotels and, now and then, a startlingly red Ferrari or chrome-yellow Lamborghini with inscrutable Arabic license tags would roar up under the porte-cochere of the Majestic or the Hotel Carlton and disgorge a leggy blonde just down from Paris to visit her “sick uncle.”

  Thing about all these bloody sick uncles, Hawke had noticed on prior occasions, was that they seldom if ever emerged from their shuttered lairs to take the air. So, what on earth did they do in there with those leggy nieces all day?

  At just after ten that evening, a Friday night in early May, in a gilded grey-and-white bedroom at the Hotel Carlton, Alexander Hawke, recently arrived, and a woman, recently encountered, were making noisy love, thrashing about on an ornate and very rumpled bed. Kissing the woman hard on the lips, he stole a glance at the faintly glowing blue dial on his wrist. The dive watch confirmed the atomic clock in his head, an internal biological device that was usually accurate to within one minute.

  Yes. Time to get a move on.

  “Du vent,” the woman murmured, pausing in her own fluid rhythms to gaze at the louvered shutters banging violently against the French doors of the terrace. The howling cold wind had to be gusting upward of thirty knots.

  “Yes,” he said, gently stroking her cheek. “What about it?”

  “C’est terrible, eh?”

  “Hmm,” Hawke said, a bit preoccupied at the moment.

  Hawke’s back arched involuntarily. A cry escaped his lips. She was still breathing hard, sitting astride him, and he admired her strong ivory profile in silhouette. She was naked save for the black sable stole draped over her shoulders, loosely fastened at the neck with a diamond brooch, probably an old Van Cleef by the look of the setting. Beads of sweat formed a rivulet between the hills of her dark-tipped breasts and there was a light sheen of moisture on her high forehead.

  She was strikingly beautiful. Astonishingly so. Her name, Commander Hawke had only recently discovered, was Jet. She was, apparently, a celebrity sufficiently famous to have but a single name. A film star of some magnitude in China. Hawke, who favored the luminous black-and-white motion pictures made on Hollywood back lots or at Shepperton Studios before and during the war, had never seen one of her films. Nor did he care to. His idea of a one-name star was Bogart.

  In fact, beyond her dark eyes, her red lips, the soft contours of
her body, and the confines of this vast bed, there was very little he did know about the woman.

  They had met that very afternoon at a posh luncheon at the Hotel du Cap over at Antibes. A German tycoon named Augustus von Draxis had hosted the affair (held on the green lawns beneath the pines of his pale blue Villa Felix), and he had graciously ferried a few guests over from the Carlton pier aboard his sleek Riva launch. As it happened, Hawke and the woman were seated together in the stern for the short and stormy voyage across the bay at Cannes to Cap d’Antibes. It was spectacularly rough going, and he had admired both her cheek and her cheerful nonchalance.

  “Well, you’ve certainly got good sea legs for a woman,” Alex Hawke said to her. Her expression hinted that she did not take this as a compliment.

  “Il fait froid,” she said, shivering. She was eyeing his somewhat shabby Irish fisherman’s sweater. Besides his navy kit and dinner jacket, he didn’t have much in the way of wardrobe. The woman was wearing a very short black dress, raw silk, with bare shoulders and a necklace of large Tahitian black pearls in graduated strands. Quite expensive baroques, Hawke thought, noticing their irregular shapes. Jet had not dressed for heavy weather. She had dressed for men.

  “Sorry,” he said, pulling the thing over his head and handing it to her. “How thoughtless.” He still had on his old blue flannel shirt, which offered a modicum of protection from the wind.

  “Right,” she said, somehow donning his thick woolen sweater with only minimal further disturbance to either her severely styled black hair or her dramatic makeup. He found himself watching her every move. Her gestures were economical, almost balletic, and Hawke found himself mesmerized. He knew quite a few men who were besotted with Oriental women. He had never quite understood the fascination until this very moment.