And so it was. She took her fill of him, screamed a little, then slumped off to one side. “I will sleep now,” she said quietly. “For a little time I will sleep. So it is always with me. You will not disturb me for anything.”
And sleep she did. The perfectly natural sleep of a satisfied animal. Nick listened to the deep regular breathing for a moment, put a tentative foot out of the bed, then drew it back. Give her five minutes. And hope to God she had not switched on the alarm again. He needed a little luck just now.
He lay with his hands clasped beneath his head and stared at the ceiling. The speaker was mute. The projector was blind. He wondered what had happened to his clothes. His “cover” clothes, the filthy long johns and the rest — and where was the Webley? He was buck naked in a witch’s castle. Surrounded by alarms and dogs and guards — and don’t forget Brünnhilde with the Luger. She would just love to put a slug in him.
The AXE agent crinkled his eyes and hummed, very softly — “They’ll never believe me when I tell them, and I’m certainly going to tell them — dum-dum-da-dum—”
Five minutes had passed. The woman still slept. Nick eased out of bed. The alarm did not sound. He went to the tall windows, pulled the drapes and stared out. There was no escape this way. To his right and left he could see crenellated towers. Between them, below the windows, the scarp fell away sheer to the foam-washed rocks below. Those jagged gray teeth, he guessed, were a good two hundred feet down. No exit!
To his right, to the north, he could see a complex of low white buildings, so situated in a natural declivity in the cliff that they had not been visible when he spied with the glasses. They would not, he thought, even be visible from the road. They were squat, one-story affairs — five of them — and looked fairly new.
As he watched he saw two men in long white gowns leave one of the buildings and walk to another, talking and gesticulating. The long gowns were such as laboratory technicians might wear. Nothing so unusual there, Nick conceded. The buildings could be laboratories where The Bitch worked out new formulas for skin creams and other aids to beauty and eternal youth. Could be. What made it unlikely was the little tableau he now saw enacted.
As the two men reached the door of a building an armed guard stepped into sight and stopped them. Nick wished fervently for his glasses, yet his own superb eyesight served well enough for him to see that this guard was different from those on the gate. This man was either a mestizo — or a Chinese! He was dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, knee socks and what looked like heavy army shoes. He wore a flat, vizored cap without insignia. But it was the guard’s manner that most impressed the AXE agent — there was a military snap and stance about the man as he examined credentials.
Nick Carter whistled very softly. There was Chinese military personnel in Mexico. And the security was tough — those two men had had to show credentials just to pass from one building to another. As though they were captive workers not to be trusted out of sight.
Behind him Gerda von Rothe stirred on the swan bed and moaned in her sleep. Nick ran for the bathroom.
He took a bath in the pool, splashing and swimming a few strokes, and showered away the soap. He was keen and alert now, the mescal only a bilious memory. He found a small cabinet with its own special shaving mirror and light, containing everything a man might need for his toilet Everything was expensive, the very best. Nick grimaced at himself in the glass as he stroked away the black stubble. It figured. He was betting there would be some men’s clothing around, too.
She was awake when he came out of the bathroom. She gave him a small smile as he came to within six feet of the bed and stopped. There was approval in her glance, Nick thought, approval and something else. A hint of regret? Was she going to hate to kill him after he had done her dirty work?
“I had no idea,” said The Bitch after a moment, “that you were so handsome under that beard. Your face matches the rest of you, Jamie. You are positively a ravishing brute.” Her green eyes swept lightly over his body without lingering and Nick breathed a little easier. She was satiated — at least for the moment.
“I can’t do much this way,” he told her. “I need some clothes. Where are mine?”
“I had Erma burn them, of course.” She pointed. “Press that button set into the wall near the bathroom door.”
Nick did so. A panel slid back in the wall to disclose a long, deep closet. Neatly arranged on hangers was a long row of men’s suits and slacks. Dozens of both. They bore London, Paris, Rome and New York labels. Nothing but the finest for La Perra’s studs, thought Nick.
A third of the closet was devoted to shelves on which were stacked shirts, socks, underwear, costly ties still in their boxes. Beneath the shelves were at least fifty pairs of shoes of every size and type. Everything was new. Naturally. When she got rid of her itinerant paramours she would bury them — if she bothered to bury them — in the clothes they wore at time of death.
“Select anything you want,” she said from the bed. “Get dressed and- remain here until I send for you. Then we will have breakfast and talk some more.”
She left the bed and slipped on a robe and put her feet into high-heeled mules. She went toward the double doors. Over her shoulder she said, “Remember, Jamie — do not try to leave until I send for you. There will be a guard outside. It is for your protection. There may be spies among my own people, and I don’t want Harper and Hurtada to know you are here until the last minute. When it is too late. We must be very careful.”
As she opened the door Nick caught a glimpse of an armed guard sitting in a chair tilted back against the wall. He leaped to his feet as The Bitch came out. He wore a dark gray uniform, a highly polished Sam Browne and the silver insignia of the lily glinted on his cap. Peeking from the buttoned-down holster was the heavy butt of a .45 automatic.
Nick saw the man click his heels and salute the woman as she passed. She paid no attention. Then the door swung shut.
As he went about selecting his clothes, Nick Carter was very much deep in thought. The more he learned about this strange setup the screwier it got — yet he could, was just beginning to, catch a glimmer of what was going on. Like a figure seen through several feet of semi-opaque water, as through a glass darkly, he was beginning to make out the outline of events. It appeared to be, indeed, a palace revolution.
Two distinct sets of guards. One set was military and — he was betting on it — Chinese; the other set was para-military and owed allegiance to Gerda von Rothe. She had been expecting help — Neo-Nazi help. Harper and Hurtada had forestalled that, so the von Rothe had taken a daring gamble — Nick’s smile was cold — and retained what she thought was a beautiful, and mindless brute to protect her. Protect her? He had to chuckle at that. She needed protection the way a tigress or a black widow needed it.
The fact remained that he had stumbled into a minor civil war, an internecine struggle for stakes about which he knew very little — except that they must be high. Terribly high.
Nick selected a pair of gray Daks, suede shoes with rubber soles, a shirt of Irish linen with short sleeves and a light tan bush jacket. He knotted a white silk scarf about his throat and buttoned the jacket over it. Contemplating himself in a mirror he thought that perhaps he looked a bit too much the sophisticate — it was not his fault that he wore casual clothes so well — and was tempted to change, then thought the hell with it. The Bitch was going to be pretty busy. She would not have time to become suspicious. Probably she would not even notice, and if she did she would merely think it a case of a rough diamond coming out well when polished.