Cairo Cabal

The Prophetess

Mindanao Pearl

Joshua's People

The Cheetahs

The Hot Sun of Africa

House on Curzon Street

Rampage

The World is Six Feet Square

Khartoum

South of Khartoum

Bichu the Jaguar

ASSAULT ON LOVELESS

Book Three

Copyright 2024 Eagle One Media, Inc.

Original Copyright 1969 Alan Caillou

All Rights Reserved.

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CHAPTER 1

The beautiful, peaceful road wound along the sandy coastline with pines on one side and the bright blue-and-white surf on the other; and we were shooting along it at a hundred and fifteen miles an hour in the Jensen, a special bodied four-seater I keep in Europe because every time I settle down to catch up on my studies—I’m very fond of the processes of learning—at home in San Francisco someone sends me a cable that says come back.

It’s an FF model, the four-wheel-drive version of the Interceptor, which isn’t a bad car either, and the model I would have bought if I hadn’t been sold on the value of four driving wheels and the unique Ferguson limited-action differential. Of course, I had to have the top cut off, since they don’t make a convertible in this model, and with a roof over my head there’s always the problem of getting in and out; I’m six feet seven, and that can be a bit of a nuisance when it comes to fast and comfortable driving. It also has the Chrysler overhead-valve mill which gives you a mere three thousand on the tachometer at seventy-five miles an hour; not that I often loiter at that speed if I can help it.

Beside me, I was conscious that Fenrek was trying hard not to show just how worried he was, and I said, with a sort of shrug: “Well, you did say hurry, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes I did.” I knew that the line of his thin, aristocratic lips was tightening. He said: “She’s probably there by now anyway.”

He sat hunched up in the glove-leather seat, his tight frame, muscular and efficient, wedged into the bucket and his feet properly braced. Colonel Matthias Fenrek, at fifty-five years of age Interpol’s top man in Department B7, here from his Paris H.Q., on a sort of working holiday that wasn’t going to turn out to be quite as relaxing as he’d hoped. He’d been expecting to sit on the glorious beach at Estoril and do nothing, with maybe Astrid’s lithe and lovely movements to watch (keeping a watchful eye all the time on the men who were always trying so desperately to get close to her); or perhaps watching instead the gorgeous mistress he was supposed to have tucked away somewhere.

Astrid was his niece, a handsome young woman he was very fond of, twenty-seven years old and already a dammed good nurse, on leave from her New York clinic to be with her uncle on the beach for a while. Except that now, she was heading for quite the wrong beach...

I said: “The police will stop her before she can get too close.”

“You don’t know Astrid as well as I do. She can talk her way past anybody. She’ll flash her Carte Blanche at them, use my name in a hushed sort of voice, and sweep right by them all. I thought you said this car would do a hundred and fifty?”

I put a little more weight on the pedal and leaned into the wheel as the road swung gently north. We’d come from Lisbon; and Alges, Queiras, Parede, and Estoril itself had flashed past us with hardly more than a temporary slackening of speed. Cascais, the little fishing town, was gone too, in a blur of white-washed houses and tall-masted shrimp boats. The police here don’t like this kind of road racing, and who can blame them? But with Interpol beside me I wasn’t too worried; and they’d never catch the Jensen anyway, not with those six and a quarter liters under the hood.

Now, the Bocca do Inferno was on our left, the majestic and terrifying waterspout that’s a tourist attraction when it’s playing gently, as it does sometimes, but is a thing to keep well clear of when the wind’s in the southwest, as it is once in a while. It was showing off gently now, sending a great white sweep of spray over the hot tarmac of the road as the driven waves smashed into the confining caves sixty feet below and funneled up violently into the hot blue air. There were notices there to keep the over-inquisitive away, and the danger area was well fenced off; even at its gentlest, the Bocca was a good place not to get too close to.

The road straightened out again, swinging gently back west, and Fenrek said: “Two and a half miles.”

I dropped down to a hundred, down to ninety, did a racing change, and heard the whine as the powerful motor took over and braked us down to sixty, then began to play with the foot brake, the Maxaret system that oscillates so that you can’t lock your wheels and spin out of control whatever your speed. And when Fenrek pointed and said, “There...” and the track to the beach was only a hundred yards ahead, we were down to fifty, and I swung the wheel hard over, bouncing over the sand towards the sea.

He said suddenly: “There she is.”

I’d seen her; her little rented Mini-Moke, like a toy green box on four wheels, was lumbering easily over the broken ground, five hundred yards ahead and below us. I sounded SOS on the horn, and saw the white-blond head turn to look, and then she waved, a bright young girl in a red cotton shirt and a white scarf at her neck. She waved again, and I growled at Fenrek, “You’d think she’d know an SOS when she hears one.”

She was looking back at us and waving one hand in a friendly gesture, recognizing Fenrek and perhaps wondering who I was; she was wearing huge round sunglasses with pink lenses, halfway down her nose. And then I banged on the horn again, imperiously, and swung the Jensen over to jump the ditch on my right, pushing hard on the throttle to get her over, landing ten feet off the track and swinging round to get back on it again at a lower level, in second gear now.

She’d seen the maneuver, and now she stopped. She was just barely close enough for the puzzlement to show, knowing that you don’t treat a car like mine quite so disrespectfully unless there’s a good reason. She swung round in the seat and waited, and Fenrek stood up, grabbing hold of the windshield frame, and waved his arm and yelled: “Back, Astrid, get back, back up the hill, hurry, fast...”

By now we were close beside her, moving at no more than twenty mph, and I swung the Jensen in front of the Mini and braked hard. Fenrek fell out, somehow landing lightly on his feet, and vaulted in beside the girl and shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here, fast, every second counts!”

She didn’t waste any more time. She pushed the tiny toy car straight at the steep sand of the bank, bounced it up till its nose was almost in the air, and found her way back on the track once more. I followed, more sedately now that the immediate danger was over, fifty feet behind them in their fine red dust, and when we reached the tarmac road again and she’d stopped, I switched off the motor, got out and went to join them.

Fenrek made the introductions. “My old friend Cabot Cain, Astrid Tillot. You’ve both heard about each other.”

Her face was grave, a child’s face with shiny pink skin and wide blue eyes. Her cheekbones were high, her forehead broad with the silver-white hair piled high on her head. There were tiny lines at the side of the mouth, as though she was always ready to smile. It was not a beautiful face, but a very attractive one, none the less. The red sweater was high at her neck, the breasts tight and pointed.

She held out her hand. “And are you as inexplicably worried as my uncle, Mr. Cain? It’s nice to meet you after all these years of eulogy.”

I said: “Just as worried. And I wish our first meeting could have been less...hectic.”

She looked puzzled. “But it’s not in the least contagious—there’s no danger at all. So why you should go to so much trouble...”

I interrupted. “No danger if we know what it is. But we don’t.”

“But we do!” She said, insisting: “We do know what it is. I don’t want to be technical, but...”

“You can be as technical as you like.”

She took a moment to smile briefly: “Yes, of course. Well, most people call it mussel poisoning, because it’s often caused by eating poisoned mussels. But more correctly, it’s dinoflagellate fever, and you can get it from eating any fish that’s been contaminated. It’s just that mussels carry it more easily, in a much higher concentration, but so do shrimps, and mullet, and sardines, and anything else. A nasty business, but it can be contained fairly easily, and anyone who gets it can be cured if you catch it in time. That’s what I’m here for.”

“It’s not dinoflagellates,” Fenrek said quietly.

She stared. “Uncle, it is! Take a look out there.”