The elder, Rowena, had been killed on the eve of her divorce from Richard. She had driven a wedge between Mariner and Heritage that only the younger daughter, Robin, had been able to remove. But at a price. During the years when Richard had worked away from the sea — and in bitter separation from Heritage Shipping — Bill had come to rely on Robin as his strong right hand. And now, the reliance he placed on her, the closely personal nature of the relationship between father and daughter had been fundamentally changed by her marriage. Bill and Richard were far too similar, though a generation apart, and the products of vastly different backgrounds and experiences, but essentially they were of a kind. In that strange way that men have, each had seen Robin as belonging to him, and not even that extraordinary woman could share herself between them.
Now, with Robin on the far side of the world, Bill had found himself a new right hand. Her name was Helen Dufour and she sat in the deep seat at his side now as he throttled the Bentley up the sheer mountain road toward Cold Fell where they would spend the coming weekend as secret lovers.
At the exact moment that Bill turned on the headlamps, sending great white beams into the gathering dark in front of them, the car phone started ringing.
Helen’s gray eyes flicked across to him as her long right hand rested questioningly on the handset. This weekend was strictly off the record, exploiting the August bank holiday to get away from the city so that she could come to know Cold Fell before she became its mistress. As far as anyone knew, she was at her family home in Grimaud, beneath the shadow of its castle overlooking the Gulf of St. Tropez; both Bill and Helen were too worried about gossip columnists to risk anything more public yet.
Bill shook his head and gestured — they were approaching a parking area. He swung onto the graveled surface and parked, already too deep in thought to be aware that the headlight beams reached out above a sheer drop as though trying to bridge the valley with light. Night was filling the steep-sided chasm with misty shade. Far below, the river thundered in summer flood; far above, a ragged rent in the cloud cover gave a first glimpse of the crescent moon.
Part of Helen’s mind took all this in as Bill reached for the phone, pushing her hand off it. “Yes?” His voice was strong, even at his age; virile.
The handset gabbled.
Helen lay back, stretching, every sense tensely alert beneath apparent sleepiness. She herself had left “emergencies only” notes for both of them with the weekend secretariat; this had to be a major problem. But it soon proved to be much worse than anything that sprang to her pragmatic Provençal mind and the beginning of her part in the nightmare most of them would be lucky to walk away from.
“Piracy!” The quaintly archaic word was the first he could manage to say after hanging up. He turned to her, face expressing both rage and disbelief. “They’ve seized Prometheus with her whole crew. John Higgins, Bob Stark, Asha Quartermaine…”
“Why?” She had no French intonation. She spoke English as though she had spent all her life at Oxford, her accent a direct reflection of her mental acuity and academic education.
“God knows! Arab terrorists, apparently. Nobody knows any more than that, except…”
She waited, knowing better than to prompt him.
“…except they say they’ve executed a senior officer to prove how serious they are.”
“Dieu!”
“We have to contact Robin and Richard at once!”
“Impossible, unless they have radioed in to the office. No one knows where they are.”
“We’ve got to go back to London. Now!”
Even as he spoke, he was swinging the Mulsane out onto the empty road.
They were back in Heritage House on Leadenhall Street in London before midnight. A sleepy doorman checked them through security and they rode up in the lift together. The top floor was electric with tension, the twenty-four-hour secretariat supplemented by those executives Helen had managed to contact on the car phone while Sir William was exceeding the speed limit by a factor of almost two, racing down the empty M6 to London. Into this tense atmosphere they stepped, deep in conversation, and unconsciously undid all the careful secrecy that had obscured their true relationship until now. Security had buzzed up. Everybody was waiting for them, many agog to know how two people apparently spending the weekend at different ends of the continent could manage to turn up simultaneously. But such speculations were almost forgotten as everyone bustled into the quickly overcrowded chief executive’s suite of offices. It was the natural place to go, under the circumstances. Such was the nature of Heritage Mariner’s senior management that there were three suites of offices here: Bill Heritage’s, the Mariners’, and Helen Dufour’s. Officially “retired” for some years now, Sir William’s position as chairman of the board gave him a small suite that he used only occasionally. Robin and Richard, as joint managing directors, shared a large, fully equipped complex, which consisted of their own offices, two secretaries’ offices, a bedroom, and a bathroom. But all that was closed off now. So it was natural that everybody gather in Helen’s office because she was the senior executive present, chief executive until Robin and Richard returned, the one with her fingers currently on the pulse of the business.
Her desk was not made of teak or mahogany like the others’, but of molded plastic: more like the console in a spacecraft than anything else. The central writing area was surrounded by dials and video display screens controlled from a keyboard designed to slide in and out like a central drawer. Phones, each one with its own molded perch, nested round the upper edge; all programmed to contact over one hundred numbers worldwide, just in case Helen’s computers could not get enough online information directly from the computers of her contacts. Her fingers were busy the moment she sat in her chair; simultaneously she began interrogating all the staff members who had been there since the first bulletin. As she talked she tapped in urgent requests for information and was answered at once through her electronic mail system. The screens filled with messages. The printers in her secertary’s office chattered discreetly into life.
But no new information of any use was currently available. As the small hours ticked slowly by, it became clear that there was no machine-generated or — stored information for any of them. Bill Heritage, content to take a back seat and reexamine those files Helen had finished with at greater depth, began to get restless. He understood the high-tech information-gathering systems Helen used almost as well as she, but he also knew they had their limitations. Reaching the limits of his patience, he scowled at his watch and crossed to his own, unimpressive office. The new computer networks were stymied for the moment: it was time to try the old-boy network.
They were at school together, went up to Cambridge together, joined up together in 1939. After demobilization, the thirty-year-old Captain Bill Heritage had gone into shipping. Commander Justin Bulwer-Lyons had joined the Diplomatic Corps. He had been Bill’s best man — and might be again, sooner than he knew — and was Robin’s godfather. Neither man was in his wonted position of absolute power any longer, but each kept his finger on the pulse. Bill and Bull had been famous for their all-night activities in their youth and neither of them slept much now, either. Bull answered the phone on the third ring.
“Bull? Bill Heritage here.”
“Been expecting your call, old man. What can I say? It’s a nasty business. One dead so far, I understand.”
“Yes, that’s what we hear. Any word at the Bureau as to who it is…was…”