Sid shook his head. PLO dissatisfaction with Khalid al-Mazkum had been quickly vented, and his body had been found in his own office this morning. "A few million we could sweep under the carpet. But not a few billion. Khalid won't be covering anything more than a three-by-six foot plot ever again."
Fields stopped, his puffy eyes wide. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, they took him out. The PLO. They don't forgive either."
Reg Fields' trembling increased. He was essentially bankrupt and he feared the retribution of the people who had trusted him. And his wife…
Buchanan wasn't feeling very well himself. He had been destroyed in a matter of twenty-four hours. The stock exchanges had executed on his assets, frozen his accounts, and he was expecting auditors and lawyers from the SEC. He was trapped no matter which way he turned. Harry Wickes had been trying to avert this when he called, but Sid had not listened, being too wrapped up in DesirЋe's sweet palace of pleasure. Now, as he stared at the computer screen at the email he had sent to the broker, he wondered how it could have gone so wrong. The volatility list had replaced his selected buy list somehow, and he wondered how it had happened. He could not have been so scatterbrained as to do that himself. So the only answer to the question of how was who. The computers were not networked and could not have been accessed from outside. The files would have had to have been altered from right here in the study, the night of the party, most probably, most certainly, after he had shown them to Khalid and Reg, after he had used his password to access the computer. Sometime between the time when they had left the room at eleven-twenty and when he had sent the email ten hours later.
That was a fairly big window, but who could have done it? Who could have even known, or want to alter the files? As far as he knew, of the people at the party, only the three men in the study, who had taken turns with DesirЋe's sweet body, had known of the plan. Of his jackals all over the world, none had known of the whole picture, only their separate functions.
But the email he had sent was exactly the opposite of what it should have been, numbers randomly altered in a way that didn't even add up, as Harry had said. Only the three of them present could have known enough of the project to sabotage the file. Buchanan knew that he hadn't done it, and Reg Fields would have done it only if he knew he would profit somehow. But here he was, sweating and greasy, and it was plainly no act. The fat man had taken a bath, that was plain to see, nor was there any way he could have profited by having Sid sink his money into volatilities.
If Khalid had come back later and done it, why was he dead? Or was he really dead? Had he somehow faked his death? But how could he have profited from buying huge amounts of stock in dying companies? No, Khalid had been paid off for his losses in a pound of lead this morning, as a lesson to the next guy entrusted with the terrorists' money. No, Khalid would never ride another camel, or another young unbeliever again.
Unbeliever. Buchanan looked down at the couch, still stained with male ejaculations and female secretions. She had been here, asleep over there with her belly filled with the semen of three men, the same three men who were now destroyed by the events of the preceding day. Had she really been asleep? He wondered. He had not logged off after showing the computer file to his two associates. Could she have been listening? Did she really hate them enough to do this to them, after her countless orgasms and cries of joy? Of course, women said no, but they really meant yes, didn't they? She had loved it, hadn't she, all those big cocks sliding up into her tight pussy?
He looked again at the couch. She had hated it, and she had found a way to get even for the time before when he had seduced her in bed with her own husband and the time when he had shared her with the other two men. For fuck sakes! She had already set him up for a fall when he had brought her to his room on Friday morning! When Harry had called and she was sitting on his cock, she had known what Harry was talking about. Because she had done it. The bitch had done it! To him! If it weren't so horrible, so final, so devastating, it would have been funny. In one fell swoop she had avenged herself on the three of them.
Buchanan looked up at Fields. He was wiping his cheek with a handkerchief, trembling and breathing heavily, looking pitiful. To Buchanan, it was not the biggest surprise in the world when Fields grabbed his chest and fell over.
He was looking at the VDU, at the email that had been sent on Friday morning and being read by Harry Wickes just as he was easing his big cock into DesirЋe Denning's wet vagina. Besides the numbers that didn't add up, which the broker had had to reconcile, there was something else that didn't look quite right. There. There it was. She had corrected his spelling. The fastidious little bitch had corrected two misspelled words, words he had always spelled differently.
He looked up. The paramedics were wheeling Reg Fields out, performing CPR. Buchanan wasn't accompanying the fat man to the ambulance. He was already flat-lining and there was little hope. Let the hospital break the news to his wife. Whether they would let her keep the life insurance money, with all the huge liabilities the fat man now had, was another question.
Score two now for DesirЋe.
What was he going to do now? He couldn't let the little bitch get away with what she had done. First, he would have to see Mark Denning ruined, and there were a dozen ways to accomplish that, but she would have to pay with her life. But slowly. Maybe a few years in an African brothel would do. Sure, her father was rich and powerful, now much richer than Buchanan, but he would never know. Even poor men could get revenge. DesirЋe herself had done it for free.
As for Buchanan, he now had to figure out how to get himself out of this mess. The stock exchange would have this house before long. He wished he had more squirreled away in Bermuda. But he was smart, much smarter than either Khalid al-Mazkum or Reg Fields, and he would make a comeback. Then little DesirЋe, and her na•ve husband, would be dog meat. All he needed to do was set up some shell corporations and get some people to front for him. Build up his strength and get straight with some of his investors. Most of the money he had lost had been his own. It had been a decision born out of greed on one hand – he had wanted all the profits for himself – and on the other the necessity to be discreet about his inside information.
He was making plans when the door to the study opened.
"Nigel, bring me a lobster sandwich," he said.
For a long moment there was no reply, so he finally looked up. It was not the butler, but a man he had never seen before, a swarthy man who looked very much like Khalid al-Mazkum.
"Mr. Buchanan."
"Yes?" Sid said, beginning to rise.
"A message from my brother Khalid," the man said, bringing an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer out of his jacket.
Buchanan was about to make a hasty plea for mercy when the gun popped and put a bullet through his throat. The next one hit him squarely in the solar plexus and slammed him back into his expensive, leather chair.
They had immobilized his upper body so as not to tear the newly stitched wound, and the back of his thigh was incredibly sore because of the flesh he had lost there. He would need physiotherapy and lots of exercise before he could get back on the trail of the two remaining dogs, but hunt them he would, for Devereaux had raised the bounty on Lobo and Bruno astronomically. Of course, with Priscilla gone he had little else to do with his considerable fortune and his revenge would one day be sweet.
Of course, there were Rodney's pictures that told a story Devereaux would not be pleased to learn, those showing Clete shooting the now-dead girl with his revolver. He had blamed her wounds on dead Billy Canning, and the rich ranch owner had given him a check for a hundred thousand dollars without much thinking about it. Accompanied by a weeping, distraught Robyn Young, he had paid his respects and thanked the sheriff, who felt himself nonetheless to have been within his duty to stop the crazed auburn-haired beauty from murdering DesirЋe and him. Besides, the money was for the dogs, and not for keeping Priscilla alive. She had essentially committed suicide by her evil acts.