“Ah, of course,” Hawke managed to say. “Now I remember. I believe I made your acquaintance many years ago.”
“Really, señor?” de Herreras said. “I don’t think so. I would remember. In any event, my brother Manso is waiting for you in his study. Since you and your friend here have caused us so much distress in recent days, I warn you that he is not in the best of moods.”
“Pity,” Hawke said. “Perhaps I have something that will cheer him up.”
“Excellent! Please follow me,” the general said, and he strode beyond the curving staircase into the deeper shadows of the great hall. Stoke and Hawke felt the presence of the six guards behind them.
Hawke and Stoke had not seen the second stairway. This one curved down into murky blackness. The sound of the heavy-booted Chinese guards reverberated in the stillness. They had disturbed the sleep of two silky Russian wolfhounds guarding the top of the steps.
It was odd, Hawke thought, how removed this bizarre fortress seemed to be from all the gunfire and bloodshed that had taken place within the huge compound. Perhaps these generals did not dirty their hands with mere soldier’s duty.
When they finally reached the bottom of the steps, there was a long red-carpeted corridor leading in both directions. Alex figured they must be a good forty feet underground. The general beckoned, turned right, and walked past several mahogany paneled doors until he stopped abruptly, and knocked on one of them.
It slid open with a hiss, and an elderly Oriental fellow wearing black silk pajamas and white gloves ushered them all inside a massive elevator. He had a wispy little white goatee that looked like milkweed.
“To my brother’s study,” General de Herreras said to the attendant who bowed, then pushed a button.
The elevator came to a gentle stop and the door slid open. The attendant bowed deeply as they all stepped out of his car. Hawke, expecting some grand room, was surprised as they emerged instead into a dark, smallish foyer with a single table along one wall. A gilt-framed painting, lit by an overhead light, dominated the room. Alex bent over to take a look.
An early Picasso in shades of blue.
“This way, gentlemen,” General Juan de Herreras said, pressing his palm against a panel cut in the mahogany. There was a click and a door swung outward revealing a set of steep stone steps leading up. It was suddenly cool and damp inside and the air smelled of, what, chlorine? Alex touched the stone wall. It was wet and mossy. At the top of the steps, two flaming candles hung in iron fixtures on either side of a narrow wooden door.
“After you,” the general said, and Alex and Stoke started climbing.
At the top, they stood aside as the general pushed a number of buttons on a keypad mounted by the door. A green light flashed and the door swung open.
Hawke and Stoke were both struck dumb by what they saw.
The room they entered was circular. The walls and great domed ceiling were made entirely of glass. They revealed what was perhaps the most spectacular underwater view Hawke had ever seen. Huge underwater lights, all hidden, illuminated the scene beyond the glass. Tropical fish of every size and color swam by. Exotic vegetation swayed from the sandy floor.
Above their heads, a great white shark, some twenty feet in length, swam idly by, above the glass dome, followed by a school of barracuda.
“Man living at the bottom of an aquarium,” Stoke whispered. “Look up there.”
Higher above them, at least thirty feet above the glass ceiling, huge stalactites hung down and schools of brilliant fish darted through them. Stalagmites, too, rose from the bottom of the grotto, forming intricate cities of pink and white coral.
The glass room seemed to have been constructed on the sandy floor of some deep natural grotto, most likely fed by the river flowing out to the sea. At this river’s mouth, Hawke thought, the submarine pen where the Borzoi lay.
The tensile strength of the glass had to be enormous, because Alex could discern no seams, no visible means of support. And yet a massive bronze chandelier hung from a fixture at its very center. It provided the only light in the room other than the external underwater illumination. The fixture consisted of finely wrought rings of hammered brass and bronze, getting smaller toward the top.
The largest ring, the lowest, held at least fifty blazing candles, while the top ring held ten or so. It had to be suspended on some kind of hydraulic or electrically powered wire, Hawke thought, capable of being raised and lowered, otherwise, how could you manage to keep all these bloody candles lit? The effect was certainly dramatic, he had to admit.
“Some weird-smelling shit in here, boss,” Stoke said under his breath.
The air was filled with a stupefying sweetish stink, the smell of burning poppy seeds, Hawke realized. He’d walked into an underwater opium den.
“Well, well, well. Alex Hawke himself,” came a sugary voice from the center of the room. Directly beneath the chandelier was a massive oval desk. The owner of that velvet voice was unseen, seated at the desk but hidden by the back of a tall leather chair facing away from the new arrivals. “We finally meet,” the voice said, floating upwards on a cloud of pale opium smoke.
“A dream come true,” Hawke said.
“Let me get a look at this famous Hawke,” the voice said, and a tall, slender man rose serenely from the chair. He was naked from the waist up, his well-muscled back toward them. A long black ponytail reached halfway to his waist.
Hawke sucked down a quick gulp of air as he regarded the man.
There was a spider tattooed on the man’s shoulder. Black with a red spot on its belly.
Spiders were bad. Alex had been terrified of them ever since he’d awoken one night to find one crawling across his face. On his cheek. By his mouth. Had he not awoken, it would have crawled inside—
Hawke managed to let the shock of seeing and hearing this man wash over him without a trace of it registering on his face. By the time the man had pulled a dressing gown from the chair and turned to face him, Hawke had regained the same faintly amused smile he’d been wearing since entering the finca.
As Manso walked around the massive carved oval desk, Hawke eyed him evenly. The candlelight flickered darkly in those dead black eyes set in a face of decidedly feminine beauty. The long hair, still jet black, tied at the back. Too beautiful for a man. Too much raw brutality for a woman.
He was slipping his muscle-corded arms inside a long flowing robe of red Chinese silk trimmed at the neck and cuffs with black pearls.
“The night I first saw you,” Hawke said, “I thought you were a woman.”
“Really?” Manso said. “How very interesting. When was this?”
“It was a very long time ago,” Alex said. “I was just a boy.”
“We were both boys long ago, weren’t we, Señor Hawke?” Manso smiled at the thought. “Something to drink? Or smoke? Our Chinese friends supply us with lovely opium.”
“No, thank you,” Hawke said.
“How about your friend? Who is he, by the way?”
“I can speak for myself. My name is Stokely Jones, United States Navy, retired. NYPD, retired. And I ain’t thirsty either,” Stoke said, dropping his hands from his head for the first time. When Hawke saw the Cubans had no reaction to this, he did the same.
“Shall we relax? Perhaps over there nearer the glass?” Manso said, and he indicated a grouping of mandarin opium beds arranged along one section of the glass wall.
He stretched out languorously on the largest of the beds, strewn with silk pillows of gold and black and red. He stretched, flexing the fingers of both hands.
There was something very odd and studied about the general’s movements, Alex thought. He moved like a fine athlete or dancer, with exaggerated elegance and drama, as if this were his stage and all that happened here was a performance. One whose significance only Manso understood.