“I would prefer to stay here if I have to,” she told him.
Maclean smiled and Helen felt a chill run through her. He placed his hand on the back of her neck and began rubbing it gently.
“We’re gonna be together quite a while missy,” he said softly.
Helen tried to move her head away from him but he tightened his grip. He moved his other hand up to her breast. Helen gasped as he squeezed it.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Please don’t.”
“It’s a pretty dress,” he said and pulled her closer to him. “Pretty little titties.” He held her tight and ran his hand down the back of her dress, popping each button until the dress fell open. Helen felt powerless in his frightening embrace. Then he relaxed and pulled the dress from her. Her breasts seemed to erupt from the material and she could see the fire burning in his eyes as he looked at her semi naked body. His mouth opened and the saliva on his tongue moistened his lips as an atavistic urge gripped him.
Helen screamed and slashed her fingernails across his face. It stopped him but only for a few seconds. Then suddenly he picked her up and threw her on the bed. Holding her down with one hand he curled his fingers into the line of her silk briefs. He pulled them from her and Helen was powerless to stop him. She bucked wildly and Maclean seemed to become mesmerised by the sight of her open legs. The dark flash of her groin meant sensual pleasure to him and it drove him into a frenzy. He groped at the buckle of his trouser belt and fumbled madly as he straddled her and reached into the opening of his trousers. Helen fought wildly, but Maclean was too strong for her. She screamed for him to stop when suddenly a voice broke through her cries.
“Maclean!”
He stopped as the voice called a second time. He held that pose for a moment, one hand pushing down on Helen’s chest, the other inside the opening of his trousers. He turned his head away and listened again as the voice came a third time. For a moment Helen thought he was too hyped up to stop and would rape her before going outside to see who was calling him.
But suddenly he relaxed and got off the bed and tidied himself up.
“Get your clothes on,” he ordered Helen, and left the room, locking the door behind him.
Helen crawled from the bed and gathered her clothes up, blinking the tears from her eyes. They ran down her cheeks and on to her naked body. The question she had asked herself earlier about the other man, the other kidnapper was answered; it was almost certainly the person who had called for Maclean.
She finished dressing and sat on the bed, trying to compose herself, but her fingers trembled violently as she tried to calm herself down. Her kidnapper had made his intentions very clear and she knew it was only a matter of time before he returned to finish what he had started. A violent shudder ran through her body and she began to feel quite unclean.
Maclean soon returned and told her to get up. He grabbed her hair again and dragged her out of the house and across the yard to the hut. He opened the door of the vile shack and pushed her in.
“I have to go away for a couple of hours missy.” He stood in the doorway like a mountain, his chest still heaving with the tormented desire he had for her. “When I come back I’m gonna finish what I started.”
“You can’t,” Helen shouted at him. “When they release me you’ll be wanted for rape as well.”
Maclean looked at her in an odd way. “Release?” he echoed. “What makes you think we are gonna release you missy? My orders are to keep you here until everything is finished. They don’t want you then; you’re dead meat.” He laughed. “And while you’re here, we’re gonna get to know each other real well. Real well missy.”
He kept laughing and slammed the door shut, leaving Helen staring at the door and wishing she was already dead.
Chapter 10
Francesini was back in his office, his mind fixed on the problems that the death of Greg Walsh had brought to the department and quite possibly the people of America. Or was it probably? He felt he was on the edge of something so big that it was almost unbelievable. And unbelievable seemed to be the key word. Who would believe that something so outrageous and despicable was being planned by terrorists? Who would believe that such organisations were capable of such an atrocity?
The papers that Inspector Bain had passed on to him were now lying open on his desk. A report from one of the C.I.A’s intelligence analysts, sworn to absolute secrecy, naturally, was pinned to the inside cover of the folder. A note from James Starling was attached. It read:
‘Don’t worry about me firing you if this turns out to be an accurate assessment of Walsh’s fears because I won’t have a job either! Get off your backside, Remo and dig deep!!’
It was signed with the admiral’s usual, indecipherable signature.
Francesini was not worried about losing his job; it was other people’s lives he was concerned about. Starling’s urgent diktat to dig deep was not an idle suggestion but a hint at working outside the realms of legality and going deep into the grey world of covert operations; a world which was no stranger to Francesini. The devil was, he didn’t know where next to go. He already had agents working in and around Freetown, searching for Marsh and Helen Walsh. He had a security sweep in progress on Hakeem Khan and his known associates in America and across the globe. He had electronic surveillances in place wherever he could but had failed in an attempt to get listening devices installed on the Taliba, and all that satellite imagery turned up were some clever photographs of the ship.
He closed the folder and pushed it to one side. Beneath it were several photographs of the Taliba which had been taken from the Coast Guard cutter while the boarding party had been on the ship. He thumbed through them, idly speculating on what might or might not be there when he stopped and looked a little closer at one of the photographs. He then shuffled through the others but returned to the one that had caught his attention.
He pulled a magnifying glass from his desk drawer, turned on his desk light even though the sunlight was flooding through the windows, and began to study the photograph carefully.
The shot of the Taliba was quite good, but it was the people on the upper deck that he was interested in, not the ship. He studied one in particular, leaning on the ship’s rail rather like a disinterested bystander. The image was too blurred to make a positive identification, but something had drawn Francesini’s eye to it.
Two minutes later he raised his head in frustration and got up from his desk. He shovelled the photographs back into the folder and locked it in his safe with the exception of the one he had been studying, and walked out of his office.
Disappointments were not unusual in the murky world of espionage; most of the time you worked on hunches, luck and sometimes hard evidence. He had a hunch that he was right, but his limited technology in the form of a desk light and a magnifying glass needed corroboration. It was with that in mind that he was on his way to the satellite imagery department and the very clever people who worked there.
Francesini was no stranger to the graduates, analysts, scientists and eggheads who worked in the imagery department, and one in particular, Bob Cooke, had often helped him before.
Cooke was a university graduate with an honours degree in an unpronounceable subject that had something to do with computer intelligence. He also loved using fuzzy logic to solve problems that would have required the nous that old time agents used once upon a time in problem solving.