Hot Ice (5 page)

Suddenly she feels his hand pressed over hers. She looks up, startled by the gesture and by the strangely intent look in his eyes. I feel good about this, she thinks. I must be crazy.

Chris refuses the offer of a lift home and mumbles her thanks for lunch. She needs a walk to sort out her many impressions. Just what is Dave after? She is well aware of his overbearing maleness and his sex appeal, despite his age. Yet he deliberately set out to give the impression that he is taken by her. She doesn’t believe him. Why should she? Men haven’t exactly been beating a path to her door prior to taking this job. Dave could have anyone he wants. And why is Ben confiding in him. She will have it out with him, she decides. Nevertheless, she can’t completely squash a strange feeling of joy as she walks back to the office.

It is seven-thirty a.m. on Friday morning and raining when Chris reaches her office. She switches on the light and feels a surge of joy flooding through her as she glances around. She been here for only four days, but she’s loving every minute of it. Her desk is piled high with Ben’s research files and she has pages of notes waiting to be typed. She intends to keep her office ultra functional, no pictures, no art, not even a calendar to spoil the plain white expanse of her walls, but already there’s a massive bouquet of flowers in a cut-glass vase from David perched on the filing cabinet.

Ben was amused when the flowers arrived. ‘Just shows…you never really get to know a guy through work. I thought Trans-Africa was Dave’s only interest.’

Today is Ben’s last day. He leaves for the States in the morning. She will miss him, but hopefully he
won’t be away for more than a fortnight. This past week they’ve worked together for twelve hours a day and already it seems as if they’ve known each other for years. What a curious, complex man Ben is. To some extent they have learned to size up each other’s strengths and weaknesses, as they drive each other to the limit. But it hasn’t been all work and no play. Some evenings they have put the work aside and gone for walks in the park and twice they went to dinner and then there are the sad times when he tells her how much he misses his family.

Someone is unlocking the main door. It’s Ben and he looks exhausted.

‘You haven’t slept much,’ she accuses him.

‘True, but I can sleep on the plane. You can take things easy today. I have a few meetings, but if you don’t mind working late again tonight we could finish off the statistics.’

Chris assumes that her acceptance is taken for granted. Not that she has any objection to spending the evening with this sensitive, soon to be eligible, sexy man.

By seven p.m. Ben is still briefing her. The sun is lingering on the horizon and long shadows are reaching out across the park. A chill is hanging around and Chris shivers in her summer dress and wonders if she can break Ben’s flow to fetch her cardigan. They have been in his office for the past two hours. Clearly Ben has set his heart on a
functional office with no personal artefacts or distractions to scatter his concentration, but the desk is littered with bulging files and so is the floor behind his chair. Reference books lie where they have fallen, while notes impaled on spikes gather dust. Ben is overworked and it shows. Chris turns from the window and switches her mind back to their work.

‘It’s easy to find buyers for blood diamonds, but the prices are low,’ he tells her. ‘There’s a network of agents buying illicit roughs in all the main diamond producing centres. Some of them are Russian, bartering second-hand arms for diamonds. When the Congo was banned from trading, other routes were found. No one knows quite how…yet it’s working. My guess is al-Qaeda.’

‘But Ben, do you have any real proof that al-Qaeda is involved?’ Chris wonders if she should be so forthright, but it’s too late now.

‘Not yet, but you may be luckier. I have a lead for you to follow up. I stumbled on it by accident. You’d better take a couple of notes.’

Chris grabs her notebook.

‘When I was studying economics at London University, I joined a local cricket club and discovered that a member of the team was also in my economics classes, a Prince Husam Ibn al-Faisal, to give you his full title. An unlikely friendship evolved, mainly because we found ourselves thrown together time and time again…at
training sessions, parties, lectures, tutorials and so on. Eventually I got to know him pretty well, although our opposing cultures, class and incomes prevented any deep confidences.

‘Prince Husam went on to get his Masters because he was expected to play an important role in the Arab Bank, or so he told me. Yet I bumped into him two months ago at a conference on sisal production in East Africa. I was damned curious to see the prince there, so I checked with the conference organisers and learned that Husam works at an old established South African building society, called the African Provident Trust, which is, or was, firmly entrenched in white South African culture. I decided to check further and I learned that after the white regime went out, massive influxes of cash from an Arabic investment bank gained control of the building society. That was when they moved the head office to London.’

Ben frowns and pauses. ‘It’s just a hunch, but I couldn’t let go. Since then there have been continuous injections of cash into the company’s accounts from the Middle East. Lately, the Provident Trust has been providing funds for various cultural groups to study in the Middle East and it’s been spreading its tentacles all over Africa. Sisal in Tanzania is just one of the many projects our prince is taking a keen interest in.’

‘But I thought that the Saudis are firmly opposed to Islamic fundamentalism.’

‘So did I, but who knows what Husam’s views are and he’s running the show. He hates to use his title, by the way. While I’m in the States, I thought you should hack in to their computer system and find out about their money flows. Janice in IT will help you. Perhaps aid to Africa could be stretched to include purchasing diamonds. You may find the missing link we badly need.’

It’s eight p.m. and Ben looks tired. He stands up and yawns and then apologises sweetly. Chris, on the other hand, is in no hurry to get home. She’s loving every minute of the briefing. Now, at last, she has something to sink her teeth into. She can’t wait to get started. She certainly needs no help from Janice, and why should she restrict her efforts to hacking. She’s longing to show Ben just how determined she can be.

‘We haven’t really finished, but I have to leave early tomorrow morning. Come on. Let’s get out of here. We’ll have dinner, but it’ll have to be brief. I still have to pack.’ He shoots a nervous glance her way. ‘Fancy cooking while I pack? My place is nearby and the fridge is full of TV meals for one. I have some excellent whisky.’

‘Why not! I’ll fetch my coat.’ Seeing Ben’s apartment will give her a chance to get to know him better, Chris imagines.

She couldn’t have been more wrong, she realises ten minutes later, when they have risked the archaic lift to reach the eighth floor of a Mayfair apartment block. Ben’s home, with its scarlet, over-stuffed couches, Persian carpet and reproductions of hunting scenes on the walls, seems ridiculously wrong until she learns that it came furnished and he has only been there for two weeks. Ben has left home at his wife’s request, he explains, and he’s expecting that she will miss him enough to ask him to return, but so far this hasn’t happened.

‘It’s straight moral blackmail, Chris. My wife wants me out of FI. There’s too much travelling. Make yourself at home.’ He hands her a glass of neat scotch. ‘Ice in the fridge if you like it on the rocks. Back in a second.’

Looking around, she sees touches that are pure Ben: a clarinet lying on the table with piles of sheet music; a large case of CDs, jazz and classical; another bottle of pure malt on the mantelpiece; some of his books: poetry, economics, medieval history and aerobic exercises, plus snaps of his family on a recent skiing holiday. There’s a photograph of Ben taken at the launch of his book on corporate fraud and another of Ben and his wife at a nightclub. Annette is beautiful, in her late thirties and she looks feminine, but capable, not the sort of woman to let her marriage go to pieces.

Ben returns from the bedroom. He’s changed into corduroy trousers and a T-shirt. ‘It’s too bad I
have to leave when you’ve only just begun,’ he grumbles. ‘I have a bad feeling about the trip.’

‘What sort of a bad feeling? How bad?’ Chris asks, feeling troubled.

‘The worst. But it’s only feelings. They don’t mean anything. What I meant to say is that I spent this morning dictating details of my research to date. The tapes are in the filing cabinet. I haven’t got far with this investigation, mainly because I only began recently.’

The phone rings and Ben runs his hands through his hair in a nervous gesture she is getting to recognise. He drains his glass. He seems to know who’s calling.

‘Hi darling.’

Chris goes into the kitchen, but she can still hear Ben’s voice.

‘Yes, I must. But it’s not bloody business. It’s family. Come with the kids, if you like.’ There is a long silence. ‘I don’t see anything particularly irresponsible in my statement. We’ve had holidays together before now… Well, I agree, it’s hardly a holiday, but the kids would love to see New York and you could do some shopping. Just a suggestion.’ Another long pause. ‘I don’t like them much either, but Sharon’s married into the family and she deserves our support. What’s that? God how I hate that phrase: “not my problem”. OK, goodbye. I’ll call the kids from the airport.’

Chris busies herself around the kitchen. She finds
chicken curry and rice for two and plenty of lettuce and tomatoes. She hunts around for something else and finds onions and chives in a cool box. She makes a salad while the food is warming, serves in the kitchen and puts the plates on a tray. Ben is standing at the window, his back turned. When he swings around, she sees his sadness and she longs to comfort him.

‘There’s a chance I can hang on to my family by leaving the company, but I’m so resentful. It’s straight blackmail and it’s hurting. I’m not sure if our marriage can survive this. I feel trapped. I love my work, but I don’t want to lose my kids.’

Chris decides to change the subject. ‘The food’s ready. Where do we eat?’

‘There’s a small dining-room through that door.’ He smiles. ‘You’re very efficient.’

‘It’s not difficult to warm a TV meal, Ben. No more silly flattery please.’

She places the tray on the table and feels Ben’s hand on her shoulder. When she turns, his expression hurts, so she puts her arms around his waist and hugs him, but she’s unprepared for the delicious smell of him, or his taut, muscled back, or the way he clutches her. He holds her very close and a sigh shakes his body.

‘It will come right Ben. No woman in her right mind would let you slip through her fingers.’ She steps back and sits down. ‘The food’s getting cold.’

‘Thanks Chris. I was in dire need of a hug.’

‘So was I. Come on, let’s eat.’

‘To music? Do you like jazz?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Clarinet?’

‘The best.’

Ben plays a Benny Goodman CD and puts his sadness behind him. Over supper, he tells her of some of his investigations that have gone badly, but hilariously, wrong, like the time when the night watchman’s dog trapped him against the wall of the IT room of a pharmaceutical company until the morning shift arrived. ‘My first and last attempt at breaking and entering.’

Chris steers the conversation back to their investigation. ‘I assume you think that Sienna was kidnapped by al-Qaeda agents?’ This is a possibility that Chris can’t accept. It’s too horrible to accept.

‘I guess it’s probably connected with the diamond industry, given her father’s wealth and power.’

‘I was at school with Sienna for four years. We were close friends.’

‘Why didn’t you mention that?’

She shrugs. ‘Perhaps because I’ve always been a little ashamed of my costly schooling. Sienna and I were thrown together. We became good friends, but after school our different cultures interfered with any real socialising. Sienna went on to Oxford and we hardly kept in touch. She had three years to find a good Muslim husband there. She knew that if she
didn’t she’d face an arranged marriage. We used to talk about it sometimes. I don’t normally stand around watching wedding cavalcades, but I wanted to wave to her and see her wedding dress. Once we were like sisters and I’ve always missed her. The thought that now she’s…’ Chris breaks off.

‘What a loyal girl you are, throwing yourself at armed kidnappers to save an old school friend.’ His hand reaches for hers. ‘I’m so glad I have you for a PA, Chris. It’s been a wonderful week. Why don’t we open a bottle of champagne? In fact…’ He leans forward and kisses her cheek, and Chris reminds herself that Ben has been drinking scotch steadily since they arrived. ‘I’ve such a yen for you, Chris. I’ve longed for you ever since I first saw you. You looked so forlorn and so brave, but so lovely, too. I’ll never forget the way you slipped off to check up on me…’

Chris pulls her hand away and shakes her head. ‘I’m here to work, Ben,’ she counters uneasily. ‘You’re an attractive, sensitive, passionate man and you’re not safe to be left on your own. Someone will snap you up so smartly. If your wife has any sense she’ll lure you back any day now. But I’m lonely and far too vulnerable to get involved with a man who loves his wife. I think you sense how I feel about you. I wouldn’t be able to cope.’

He laughs approvingly. ‘That’s the neatest
put-down
I’ve ever heard.’

‘It isn’t a put-down…it’s the truth. I think that’s
my cue to leave. Please be careful, Ben. If Jon’s Liberian dealer is al-Qaeda you could find yourself in real danger.’

For answer he pulls her towards him and kisses her on her lips.

‘Good luck in the States, Ben. I’ll be waiting impatiently to hear from you. Meantime, I’ll be hacking away.’

‘I’ll come down and wait until a taxi comes.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m going by tube.
Ciao
!’

Ben peers anxiously through the wrought iron gate as the archaic lift descends with clunks and clatters. ‘Take care, Chris,’ echoes down the lift shaft.

Chris sets off at a brisk pace, hoping that the walk to Green Park tube station will disperse a cloying sense of unease for Ben.

The moment she steps from the Finchley tube station Chris feels vulnerable. Someone is watching her. She pauses and looks around. It’s misty and drizzling slightly. The streets are badly lit and visibility is poor. Damn. But she knows there’s someone out there watching her intently. She should carry some type of protection…even a whistle would be better than nothing. Ignoring her intuition she sets off on the ten minute walk to her home.

It’s just a feeling, that’s all. I’ve been watching too many spooky movies. I’ve walked home a
hundred times and never been nervous. There’s no one here but me.