Питер Джеймс - Billionaire

Something, however, nagged him. He was deeply upset still over Amanda and somehow, he was sure in his mind, there was some connection between her and his accident. He tried to go back in his mind to that Monday, but there was nothing there.

‘Good morning Mr Baenhaker.’

Thoughts of Amanda’s body came vividly back to him: her streaked hair cascading like a fringed curtain across her nipples as she sat on top of him in the bed.

‘Good morning Mr Baenhaker.’

Her long slim legs and thighs, with the blaze of gold between them.

‘Just going to take a quick look and see how we’re getting on.’

The sheet and blankets were whipped back, and Baenhaker came out of his day dream to discover the surgeon, and attendant Nurse McDonald, staring down at him with faintly bemused expressions as he lay in the bed, hand firmly clenched around his poker-hard organ which protruded from the fly of his pyjama bottoms.

It was some time on Friday that Baenhaker had decided that Nurse McDonald was extremely pretty. Between then and today, he had put in a considerable amount of effort at drawing her attention and chatting her up. By the time she had gone off duty the previous night, Baenhaker was certain that he had someone who would succumb to his charms, if not in some dark corner of the hospital, then at least in the comfort of his Earls Court flat after his release. But the expression on her face as she stood now above him dispelled all of that with the tartness of a lavatory air-freshener spray. The expression on her face told him she thought he was a nasty little pervert.

The surgeon examined the stitches, then nodded. Nurse McDonald pulled back the sheet and blanket with as much grace as if she were putting the lid on a dustbin full of empty sardine cans.

‘Healing very nicely,’ said the surgeon. ‘Should have you out of here within a few days now.’ The pair of them turned to walk off, then the surgeon stopped, and leaned over to Baenhaker and whispered confidentially into his ear: ‘Don’t do that sort of thing in here old chap — it embarrasses everyone. If you have to, go and do it in the lavatory.’ Then he strode off in Nurse McDonald’s wake.

Baenhaker’s face took several minutes to lose its bright red flush. He sat and glared around the ward, and then began to scrape his teeth with the nail of his little finger. An elderly orderly marched into the ward and came up to his bed. ‘Mr Baenhaker?’

He nodded.

‘There’s a telephone call for you outside — you can take it in Sister’s office.’

‘Thank you.’ Baenhaker followed him out through the ward to the small cubicle with a chair and a telephone from which Sister conducted her empire. He shut the door, and picked up the receiver. ‘Hallo?’

The crackling and faint sound of heavy breathing told him it was an overseas call. ‘Danny?’ It was the voice of General Ephraim.

Baenhaker was feeling very fed up with his chief since Ephraim’s visit, and in light of his present mood, he had no difficulty in adopting a sullen voice: ‘Yes.’

‘How are you?’

‘All right.’

‘I’ve spoken to the senior registrar of your hospital. He thinks you’re pretty well okay now.’

‘What the fuck does he know?’

‘He’s had the reports from the surgeon. I have some urgent business for you: I want you to discharge yourself, and report to the office at nine o’clock tomorrow.’

‘I don’t know if they’ll let me.’

‘In British hospitals you can discharge yourself.’

‘What about my injuries?’

‘I’ve told you — they’re better.’

‘How the fuck do you know? You’re two thousand miles away.’

‘I’ll talk to you at nine.’ The line went dead. The head of the Mossad had rung off.

Baenhaker put the receiver back down; as he walked back to his ward, his leg twinged like crazy right down along the scar line, and his chest still hurt like hell every time he breathed deeply. He was angry, very angry, but he knew that it didn’t matter how angry he got, nor how fed up he got: he could get as angry, or fed up, or anything else that he liked. The only one thing he could not do was disobey the General’s instructions.

The taxi dropped him outside the crumbling Earls Court terraced building, where he lived, shortly after 2.00. It was drizzling hard, and he pushed his way out of it through the door and into the dark corridor with its smell of musty carpets and curry. He had no idea who in the building ate curry, but from the smell that pervaded it all the days of the year, either someone was running a clandestine take-away, or else they were addicted to the stuff.

An appalling stench hit him halfway down the corridor of the top floor, the fourth, which grew stronger with every step he took nearer his own flat. He put the key in and opened the door — it was the stench of rotting meat. He went to the kitchen and pulled open the fridge door; he gagged, and nearly threw up. The fridge had packed up, and the four steaks and two pints of milk were hopping about inside it.

Baenhaker had been at a party the previous winter, and there was a woman there who claimed she had psychic powers. He had let her read his palm. She’d predicted a lot of bad news for the future; so depressed had she been by what she had seen in his hand, that she had burst into tears. That hadn’t made Baenhaker feel too terrific either. When, on the New Year’s Eve, he had tripped over and smashed his bedroom mirror, he had begun to feel that, possibly, the mad woman had been right; things didn’t look too good.

As was his habit whenever he returned to the apartment, regardless of whether he had been out for half an hour, a weekend or, like now, several weeks, he checked each room carefully and methodically. Today, he had forgotten how gloomy the flat looked in daylight, particularly on a wet day. He’d only ever had enough money for the basics of apartment life, and several of the major items had come from second-hand shops. The exceptions were the 21'' Sony colour television, his JVC video-recorder — he was addicted to movies and this was his one real luxury — and his Walther PP automatic pistol, together with some £30,000 worth of the most sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment available in the world. Both the gun and the surveillance equipment were still in their places in the hollowed-out headboard of his bed.

He picked up from the bedside table the large framed photograph of Amanda, wearing a hardhat, surrounded by rubble and smiling cheekily. He slipped the photograph out of its frame, seized it between his two hands as if to rip it in half, then relented and pushed it out of sight into a drawer. He sat down on the bed, still unmade from the Saturday when he had set off to drive down to Bristol, and felt sad and desolate. He thought back about those months he had spent with Amanda, and then tried to stop thinking about them because they hurt too much.

They had met when a high-rise office building in Camden Town had been gutted by fire. Baenhaker’s cover role in England was as an insurance loss adjuster for Eisenbar-Goldschmidt, a major Israeli reinsurance company. He had been sent ostensibly to investigate the damage and advise Eisenbar-Goldschmidt on any potential salvage items. The real reason for his presence in the gutted shell was because one floor had been occupied by a large Israeli import-export company. The Mossad wanted to know whether there was any Arab sabotage involved, as part of a plan of international sabotage against Israeli firms, and was interested in a direct report from its own personnel, whom it trusted, and not from the British Police, in whom it had doubts — the same doubts as it had about every other organization in the world that did not openly and unequivocally proclaim and prove itself to be pro-Israeli.