Sara Craven - Night Of The Condor

The narrow passage seemed a facsimile of the one downstairs, except that the reception area had been replaced by a pair of double doors.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.