The Siren's Sting Read online

  ‘I fired that flare gun. I think you need to give me a look,’ she repeated firmly.

  The sailor could not hide his surprise—everyone knew about the flare that had helped drive off the pirates but none of the crew had claimed responsibility yet—and he handed the glasses over. Stevie spent a quick moment adjusting them, then scanned the horizon.

  The ice crackled back into her veins and she almost fell.

  Out along the horizon, like a malevolent escort, were the three Zodiacs. They maintained the same speed as the Oriana, not coming any closer, not retreating, just riding. The crewman beside her had now dropped all pretence of command and his fear was naked in his voice when he asked, ‘What are they doing? Will they come back?’

  Stevie lowered the glasses and shook her head. ‘It’s a message. They’re telling us that we got away because they let us.’

  It was fortunate for the operators of the Oriana that Angelina Dracoulis thrived on drama of all kinds. Rather than frightening her, the incident with the pirates seemed to nourish her, and she prepared for the evening’s gala performance with extra enthusiasm. She insisted that both Stevie and Sanderson stay with her in her cabin. Stevie was instructed to lie down on the massive bed and not move.

  Several bottles of champagne arrived on a trolley—fortifications, courtesy of Mr Skorpios, the nice young cabin boy had informed them. He too was pressed upon to stay, drawn into the small party, and took to filling and refilling all empty flutes, including his own.

  Stevie managed to slip out onto what was left of Angelina’s stately deck. Half the rails had been damaged by the grenade explosion. Stevie wrapped her arm around a pole for support and took out her slim phone. There was a missed call already showing—Hazard Limited. No doubt they had already heard of the attack from their sources and wanted a report. She called back on David Rice’s direct line.

  ‘Stevie! I’ve been worried sick. What the hell happened out there?’ Rice’s voice cracked with concern and Stevie felt a rush of affection for her boss. ‘Is anyone hurt?’ he asked briskly.

  ‘Everyone is fine.’ Stevie was having trouble hearing her boss—the wind and the cotton wool in her ears weren’t helping— and she was shouting into the phone as a result. ‘Angelina is safe and well.’ She told him succinctly about the attack.

  Rice was silent for a long moment, then he said, ‘I can’t seem to keep you out of trouble—I can’t believe this happened. We’re in contact with the Dutch frigate. They’ve got two Merlin helicopters shadowing you until you dock in Aden.’

  So are the pirates, Stevie almost added out loud—but she didn’t want to cause Rice any more concern. The pirates would not attack again; not this time anyway.

  ‘Zorfanelli is going mad with worry,’ Rice was saying. ‘Where is Angelina?’

  Stevie glanced over her shoulder. ‘Celebrating life with her maid and the cabin boy and a trolley load of champagne.’

  There was a quizzical silence on the line. Stevie smiled as she imagined his dear face twist with puzzlement. David didn’t do frivolity very well. It wasn’t his thing. He was ex-SAS and his shell of imperturbability seemed impossible to crack. One day . . . She was sure there was more inside. She remembered the great booming laughs on her parents’ terrace, the way David had danced with her mother—was it the tango?—and talked for hours with her father. She wanted to open him up again, be the key to that lock. So far she had not succeeded and it pained her.

  Rice was saying something but her ears were ringing again and she couldn’t make out the rest.

  ‘I’m having trouble hearing you—I’ll send a full report to Josie this afternoon.’

  ‘I said, we’ll sort something out in Aden.’ Rice was shouting.

  ‘Not to worry,’ Stevie assured him. ‘Angelina has befriended a gentleman who wishes to fly us to Turin on his plane: Socrates Skorpios.’

  There was silence. ‘A gentleman—not the way I would describe him.’ Then, after another pause, ‘Zorfanelli will not be happy.’

  ‘I see the problem.’ Zorfanelli was paying Hazard; it was Stevie’s job to keep the client happy. ‘Nevertheless, Skorpios has a plane . . . it’s that, or forty-eight hours in Aden. Explain to Zorfanelli that it’s an emergency situation. Angelina’s nerves might not hold up under too much stress and uncertainty. Zorfanelli is very keen on Angelina Dracoulis’ nerves,’ she added, remembering their first meeting with the film producer.

  ‘Fine. I’ll see you in Turin, then—I’ll call when I land.’

  ‘I could book somewhere for dinner,’ she suggested tentatively. ‘The veal in Turin is very good . . .’

  ‘There won’t be time for dinner, Stevie,’ he replied curtly, and ended the phone call.

  Her fingers hovered for a moment over the number three on her phone, the speed-dial still assigned to Henning. Should she call? Knowing Henning, he would probably turn out to be in the Yemen on some mad, literary treasure hunt and insist on coming down to visit her. She smiled for a moment at the thought of seeing his dear face, then decided there was enough excitement on her plate right now. She needed fewer complications, not more; she would be sensible and concentrate on Angelina. Stevie put the phone away.

  In the great ballroom, the passengers assembled for the gala dinner, dressed in their finest clothes and jewels. Stevie noticed that a new camaraderie had sprung up between the guests, walls of reserve tumbled down, and the conversation sparkled with laughter. It was an effect she had seen before: the collective brush with death making living all the sweeter.

  When Angelina appeared on stage later that evening, there was an intake of breath, a wave of murmurs that broke into enthusiastic applause as she reached the microphone. Dressed in a floor-length gown of red sequins, her hair pinned into a beehive and decorated with shining starfish, she looked like a mermaid dragged from the fantastical deep. Stevie, sitting between Sanderson in her sensible shoes and an older couple from Bath, scanned the room for Skorpios.

  She spotted him, alone at his usual table, immaculate in his dinner jacket and tinted glasses. He watched Angelina, his face aglow with desire.

  Angelina, too, seemed transformed, her blood aroused by the pirates. There was a suppressed fire in her voice, an intensity to her gestures, that hadn’t been there on other nights. She had painted a Coptic eye on each eyelid and when she closed them the effect was eerie; it was as if she never blinked, was always watching, like a sorceress or an oracle. As she sang her last aria, ‘Tu che di ciel sei cinta’ from Turandot, she left the stage and began to wander among the tables—something she had never done before. Angelina headed for Skorpios, alone at his table. There, she sang her death as if it were just for him, as if she were dying for him.

  ‘You who are girded with ice,

  vanquished by such fire,

  you will love him too!’

  She picked up a butter-knife from the table and held it as if she were about to stab herself in the heart. The entire ballroom was enchanted; Skorpios was transfixed.

  It seemed that Angelina had netted the great white shark, but Stevie sensed danger. She had a flash of intuition that it would bring her client no good at all. To Stevie’s sensitive antennae, Skorpios and his charm exuded menace.

  These little bursts of insight had been coming to her quite frequently since her poisoning by taipan venom in St Moritz. She could only put it down to some kind of lingering after-effect, the removal of some block in her mind, or the killing of some part of her rational brain that had made room for this . . . could she call it a gift? It would have been a wonderful boon, if only this perception could be directed and controlled. Unfortunately it usually seemed to attach itself to strangers, or people with whom Stevie had little connection.

  3

  Skorpios’ jet cruised smoothly over the Rub’ al Khali desert, carrying Angelina and Stevie, Sanderson, Skorpios and a pale man in a suit who introduced himself as Tanner. The interior of the plane was comfortable, elegant, cream and tan to match its owner; a go
lden scorpion was painted on the tail, and the same motif decorated the china and the linen napkins of the in-flight catering service.

  Angelina lay back in her seat, a silk sleeping mask over her eyes, refusing to acknowledge how far from the ground they were. She preferred trains, boats and automobiles. Stevie, on the other hand, stared through the large oval window, mesmerised by the endless sand below, the desolation, the space, the forever-flowing dunes. The Rub’ al Khali was probably the largest sand desert on earth; the name meant ‘empty quarter’ in Arabic, and even the Bedouin only ever traced its perimeter.

  High up in Skorpios’ upholstered oasis, sipping on fresh blood-orange juice, Stevie thought the desert looked beautiful: the dunes made extraordinary patterns on the earth, and here and there they caught the sun at a particular angle and shone like water. She thought of the explorers who had crossed it in the 1930s and 40s and wondered at the courage it would have taken to head into that emptiness. She, for one, was not that brave. It could possibly be conceded that she had done some brave things in her life, but these deeds had been thrust upon her as the only course of action morally imaginable at the time—not something she had sought and seized with relish. She was not an action woman: she could not run very fast; she favoured ballet slippers over combat boots, never swore, and still suffered from nightmares; she did not enjoy confrontation of any kind. She was reluctant to face risk, and it was a quality that made her very good at her job. Her art lay in her ability to pass unnoticed, to slip in and out of the cracks of life, to be quietly invisible.

  The memory that the desert forced forward into Stevie’s mind finally broke through her defences. It had been a different desert, one of the sand seas of Algeria, behind the Atlas Mountains . . .

  Stevie’s eyes filled with tears and she closed them quickly, wishing she had had the foresight to pack a silk sleeping mask like La Dracoulis.

  Five years old and her parents were the centre of her tiny universe. Marlise and Lockie, treasure hunters, furnishers of objets de curiosité for private collectors all over the world: dukes, tycoons, passionate connoisseurs, heiresses, superstars and aspirants. Often little Stevie was left in the care of her grandmother Didi in Switzerland while her parents went on foraging expeditions to parts exotic; on other, terribly exciting occasions, she went along too.

  The high desert sun had made her feel sleepy, sitting in the back of the Algerian jeep. Her mother tossed her a patterned shawl and she snuggled down on the back seat and dozed, enjoying the soft bumping and jolting of the car. Her mother’s scream woke her, the jeep screeching to a stop. Stevie flew off the back seat onto the floor. Horses’ hooves all around them; shouts; gunshots; the utter stillness of death. Stevie had closed her eyes and curled into a ball, almost too shocked to breathe.

  The little girl was eventually found by the French Foreign Legion and sent to live with her grandmother. Rumours circulated— Marlise and Lockie had been mistaken for French spies . . . it was a robbery gone wrong . . . The perpetrators of the shooting were never found.

  Stevie’s universe folded, crushed by fear and loss and sadness; she didn’t speak for half a year.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw Sanderson’s kind, plain face looking at her. She held out a pair of sunglasses—Angelina’s cat’s eyes. Stevie hesitated—the glasses were iconic, after all—but then she took them and slipped them on.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered gratefully. Sanderson simply nodded and turned back to her crossword.

  Skorpios was pacing the aisle, a glass of milky ouzo in hand. He found it difficult, Stevie had noticed, to keep still. The man was in perpetual motion. With Angelina resting, and Tanner’s well of conversation apparently now dry, he turned to Stevie.

  ‘Look.’ His large hand gestured towards her window and Stevie noticed his signet ring, decorated with a scorpion, its tail up, ready to strike. She looked down and saw a forest of steel and glass crystals rising from the sand. ‘Dubai. The mirage of the Middle East.’ He smiled his shark’s smile. ‘Have you ever been there?’

  Steve shook her head, grateful for the protection of Angelina’s sunglasses.

  ‘It is a vile place,’ her host continued. ‘New pharaohs building modern-day pyramids with slaves from southern Asia. And it will end the same way, with sand blowing in the doors of their pleasure palaces, every glass cube empty, and the bleached skeletons of the slaves who built it poking through the dunes.’

  Stevie stared at Skorpios. ‘I wouldn’t have suspected you were a man of such sentiment, Mr Skorpios,’ she said quietly.

  ‘The desert reclaims what it will, eventually. Only the Bedouin, who shift with the sand itself, can last in the desert. It is merely ego to think the laws of nature will change for you.’ He turned his gaze back to Stevie and smiled. ‘But without ego, nothing truly great would ever be achieved—ego is the audacity to begin a task that everyone else thinks is mad.’

  The ouzo was drained from the glass and Skorpios leant against Stevie’s headrest. ‘There are three forces in the universe: Zim, Zar and Zam: war, women and gold. Kings and countries have always struggled to control these forces with regulations and rules. But for some men, there are no laws; the rules of other men do not interest them, nor do the laws of the universe. Power begins and ends with them.’ He clinked the single ice cube left in the glass. ‘It is a choice to move beyond God.’

  Stevie remembered Skorpios during the pirate attack; truly he had seemed self-possessed and utterly unafraid: a man in control of the universe. She took a small sip of her orange juice. ‘And have you made that choice, Mr Skorpios?’ she asked as lightly as she could. ‘To move beyond God?’

  Skorpios stared at her for an uncomfortable moment, then smiled and made a gesture with his hand; it could have meant death, or eternity.

  Turin was asleep by the time their car pulled up outside the Turin Palace. Stevie ran a hot bath in the huge tub and slid in, closing her eyes and feeling the exhaustion leak out of her into the bathwater. Tomorrow she would see David, and she couldn’t wait. He always made her feel safe and comfortable and happy.

  The next morning she breakfasted in her room, swaddled in her bathrobe and enjoying the slightly faded grandeur of the large hotel suite. Like the city itself, there was no fizzle and glitz, only an understated, upholstered comfort that had been there forever. She poured herself a cup of steaming black coffee and pulled the end off a cornetto. The pastries looked exactly like croissants, but they were chewier and tasted vaguely of orange water—the taste of breakfast in Italy.

  Stevie opened her small suitcase and sighed. The contents were more suitable for the Bahamas via Broadway than a stay in Turin but, when pirates interfere with plans, what can you do? She hung her evening gowns and pastel-coloured Bermuda shorts, neatly lined up her three pairs of shoes. Underwear she arranged in a careful pattern. It was important to be meticulous; any disruption to the order was an infallible way to tell if the room had been searched in one’s absence. It was a habit that had served Stevie well in the past and she followed it whenever she unpacked anywhere.

  Having booby-trapped her smalls, there was nothing else to do. Angelina would sleep until noon, at the earliest, then had threatened to descend on Turin’s opera house, the Teatro Regio, in the afternoon; David Rice had said he would call when he landed at Turin airport. They would make plans then. Stevie drummed her heels on the bed base then picked up the heavy plastic telephone receiver and called her friend Leone Moro, who lived in the hills outside the city. Happily he was at home and sounded delighted to hear from her. He invited her to lunch at the Whist Club.

  Dressed in a snakeskin-print silk-jersey wrap dress and delicate leather sandals she went to find a newspaper.

  The morning air was still pink and cool, and filled with the smell of coffee and car exhausts and sugar. She picked up Il Corriere, La Nazione and La Repubblica and headed into the covered colonnades that crossed Turin. Modelled on Paris, the boulevards were covered to offer protection from the f
reezing mountain winters and the scorching sun of summer. The walkways were always dim and cool, the marble floors worn to a grooved and bumped smoothness by the centuries of footfall.

  Outside the Caffè Torino in the Piazza San Carlo, a worn brass bull was set flat into the marble floor. As was the custom, Stevie stepped carefully onto its testicles for luck. Then she entered the café and ordered a cappuccino. She only ever drank them in Italy; they just didn’t taste the same anywhere else. She began to leaf through the papers.

  Il Corriere ran the story on the third page, describing a cruise ship attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. They mentioned La Dracoulis and a lucky escape, but no details. The other two papers had not picked up the story. Someone was working hard to keep it quiet. And so you would, if you were in the shipping business, Stevie thought to herself.

  The planet was seventy per cent water and ninety per cent of the world’s goods were transported through it. The pirate attacks were driving up the prices of the goods transiting dangerous waters, driving up insurance premiums, and absorbing the attentions of the navies of several nations, including the Dutch. There was also the personal cost in violence and mental anguish to those directly involved, and their families. It was a problem in Southeast Asia, off the coast of Nigeria, and especially Somalia. It was embarrassing to some that there seemed little to be done about the attack teams of wooden dhows full of Somalians with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and machine guns and rickety wooden ladders. The civilised world had thought it had moved on from Blackbeard and Barbarossa. These attacks were an uncomfortable reminder of the veins of savagery and violence and hunger that ran so close beneath that civilised skin.

  Stevie sat up straighter. She was trying to remember to have good posture at all times. Her grandmother Didi believed posture was at the heart of elegance.

  The pirates that had attacked the Oriana had been far more than hungry fishermen. Their attack vessels had been new Zodiacs with powerful engines and they had been armed with shiny new weapons, many of them protected by body armour; even more telling was their skill: the assault had smacked of special forces training. Pirates were growing more professional, thanks to experience and the fruits of their earlier attacks, but this was something beyond a hand-held GPS and a better engine. This had been expertly planned and executed. The raiders had made a decision to withdraw. Possibly they had not expected the passengers on the cruise ship to fight back. In a way, this unnerved Stevie more than anything; it pointed to strategy. She also knew in her bones that the next attack would be more vicious.