Kitabı oku: «Power Play»

1

In London perhaps more than any other city in the world there are certain streets whose names are immediately synonymous with money and power.

Beaufort Terrace is one of them; a graceful curve of stone-faced three-storey Regency buildings. Spiked black railings curve away from the flights of stone steps that lead up to each Adam door. These railings are tipped with gold, and rightly so—the rents for the suites of offices in these buildings are reputed to be the highest in the city.

Pepper Minesse was probably more familiar with this street than anyone else who rented office space on it. Her company had been one of the very first to move in when the renovators and interior designers moved out. She owned the three-storey building right at the heart of the Regency curve. As she paused briefly outside it she was conscious of the fact that a man walking down the opposite side of the street had stopped to look at her. She was wearing a black suit from Saint Laurent. It had a deep “V” neck and looked as though she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. In actual fact she was wearing a black silk camisole, but Pepper had learned long ago the value of distracting people she was negotiating with, whether those negotiations were for business or personal reasons; she was one of those few women who exude both sexuality and power, and men felt challenged by her. When it suited her she let them think she was a challenge they could master.

Expensive cars were parked either side of the road, testifying to its exclusivity. Merchant bankers and money men fought like rabid dogs for premises here. Minesse Management did not pay any rent: it earned it. In addition to the building she owned in the centre of the terrace Pepper owned two others.

It had been a long hard fight for her to get where she was today. She knew she didn’t look like a woman who headed a multi-million-pound empire; for a start, she looked too young. She was fast approaching her twenty-eighth birthday and there was nothing she didn’t know about the complexities of human nature.

Minesse wasn’t really her surname; she had adopted it by deed poll. It was an anagram of the word nemesis, and so, she thought, a fitting title for her business. She liked Greek mythology; its almost wholesale indictment of the emotions that ruled mankind appealed to the cynical side of her nature.

It struck her as ironic and very revealing that a society that could bury under the carpet child molestation and abuse could throw up its hands in righteous horror at the very sound of the word revenge. She liked it, but then she came from an old culture; from a race that knew the rightness of exacting a just penalty for a man’s crimes.

As she walked into the building the sun caught the coiled chignon of her hair, throwing out prisms of dark red light. When she stood in the shadows it looked black, but it wasn’t. It was a deep dense burgundy. An unusual colour; a rare colour even, nearly as rare as the dense violet blue of her eyes.

As she walked into the building the man across the road studied the slim length of her legs acquisitively. She was wearing sheer black stockings. They were pure silk and she ordered them by the gross.

As she caught sight of Pepper the receptionist smiled nervously. All her staff held Pepper faintly in awe. She set very exacting standards, and she was known to be a tireless worker herself. She had had to be. She had built up the agency from nothing, and now it handled some of the world’s top media and sports stars, negotiating for them advertising revenues that bolstered their incomes well into the millionaire bracket.

The girl behind the reception desk was twenty-one years old. She was a pretty blonde with the longest legs Pepper had ever seen. That was why she employed her. Looking at them kept the clients’ minds occupied while they waited to see her.

Beyond the cool grey and black décor of the reception area, with its discreet touches of white and its Bauhaus chairs, was a luxurious interview room. Concealed behind its banks of pared-down designer wall units was the most up-to-date video and sound equipment on sale anywhere. Anyone who wanted to use one of her clients in any sort of televised promotion had to prove to her first that they knew what they were doing.

Pepper skirted the waiting room, knowing that she didn’t have any appointments. Had anyone asked her she could probably have run through her diary for a whole month without missing out a thing; she had a brain that was needle-sharp and far more flexible than the most advanced computer.

Her secretary looked up at her as she walked into her office. Miranda Hayes had been with Minesse Management for five years, and she still knew very little more about her boss than she had done on the first day she started work there.

She caught the scent of the perfume that Pepper had specially blended for her in Paris, and envied the cut of the black suit. The body inside it was almost voluptuously curved, but Miranda suspected that her boss didn’t carry an ounce of surplus flesh.

She wondered if she exercised and if so where. Somehow Pepper Minesse didn’t look the type; Miranda couldn’t in a thousand lifetimes imagine her cool, controlled boss hot and sweaty after a physically demanding workout.

“Any calls?” asked Pepper.

Miranda nodded.

“Jeff Stowell called to remind you about the cocktail reception for Carl Viner at the Grosvenor tonight.”

A briefly upraised eyebrow suggested a certain degree of impatience that the young tennis star’s agent should find it necessary to remind her.

“He said there’s going to be someone there who wants to meet you,” Miranda added.

“Did he say who?”

Miranda shook her head. “Do you want me to get him back?”

“No,” Pepper told her decisively. “If Jeff wants to play cloak-and-dagger games he must play them alone. I’m too busy to join in.”

She opened her office door and walked inside, closing it behind her, leaving only the lingering trace of her perfume.

There was nothing feminine about the room. When she had commissioned the interior designer, she had told him she wanted it to exude a subtle aura of power.

“Power?” He had stared at her, and she had smiled back sweetly. “Yes—you know, the kind of thing that goes with being the person who sits behind that desk.”

“Men don’t respond well to powerful women,” he had told her nervously. Pepper reminded him of a large lazy cat just waiting to pounce, but then he was gay, and sexual women always made him feel nervously defensive.

Pepper hadn’t argued with him. After all, he was right, but there wasn’t a man born with whom she didn’t know how to deal. It was her experience that the more powerful the man, the more vulnerable his ego; learning how to turn that fact to her own advantage had been the very first lesson she had mastered.

Through the closed door she could hear the muffled, staccato sound of her secretary’s typewriter. The sun streaming through the window caught the delicate gold chain on her left wrist. She always wore it, and she looked at it for a moment with a strange smile on her lips before taking it off and using the gold key hanging on it to unlock one of the drawers of her desk.

This drawer contained her most private files. There were only four of them. Four very special files indeed, and they didn’t belong to any of her clients. Those people who thought they knew her would have said it was typical of Pepper that she should carry the key to that drawer with her at all times, wearing it as other women might wear a lover’s gift.

She paused for a moment before taking out the files. She had waited a long time for this moment; waited for it and worked for it, and now at last the final piece of information was in her hands, and from it she would forge the tool with which she would orchestrate her revenge.

Revenge—not a word for the squeamish.

In the writings of every religion known to man were warnings against the usurpation by man of that power belonging to the gods alone. And Pepper knew why. The pursuit of revenge unleashed into the human spirit a dangerous power. For the sake of revenge a human being would endure what would be inconceivable for any other emotion.

There were no names on the front of the files; she didn’t need them. Each one had been built up painstakingly over the years; information garnered in minute amounts until she found what she wanted.

She paused again before she opened the first one, tapping a dark red fingernail on the folder.

She wasn’t a woman who hesitated very often, and people who had heard about her were often surprised to discover how small she was, barely five foot two, with a delicate almost fragile bone structure. They soon learned that her fragility was like that of steel wire, but Pepper hadn’t always been like that. Once she had been vulnerable, and like any vulnerable creature…She moved her head and stared out of the window. Her profile was pure as an Egyptian carving, her skin moulded firmly to the perfection of her bones. Her eyes slanted slightly, giving her face a mysterious allure.

She looked at the files for a long time before putting them back and locking the drawer. A smile curved her mouth. It had been so long, but now the game was about to begin.

Her phone rang and she picked it up.

“It’s Lesley Evans,” Miranda told her.

The young skating star had only recently become one of Pepper’s clients. She was being tipped to win a gold medal at the next Olympics. Pepper had spotted her over twelve months ago, and had instructed her management team to keep her under observation.

It was said in the business that Pepper Minesse had a gift for putting her money on the right horse, and what was more she always backed outsiders, on good odds.

Pepper said nothing. It made good business sense to let the Press build her up into some sort of prophetess even if it wasn’t true. It added to the mystique that surrounded her, and in actual fact her decisions were based on carefully accumulated facts, leavened by a flash or two of the intuition she had learned to trust.

The skater had been approached with a contract to advertise a range of clothes intended for the teenage sports market. The company involved was well known to Pepper. They liked cutting corners and they tied their young stars up with punitive contracts. The mere fact that they hadn’t approached Lesley Evans through her told its own story.

The afternoon brought a rash of further telephone calls. Pepper’s clients were big stars in the sports and media world with even larger egos, and she was prepared to massage them—up to a point.

At five o’clock Miranda knocked on the door and asked if it was all right for her to go.

“Yes, do…I shan’t be here much longer myself. The reception at the Grosvenor starts at seven.”

Pepper waited until a quarter past five before she unlocked the drawer again. This time there was no hesitation as she took out the files and walked into her secretary’s office, sitting down at the electronic machine on her desk. Miranda would have been chagrined to see the speed and accuracy with which she typed. There was no hesitation; Pepper knew exactly what she was doing.

Four files.

Four men.

Four letters that would bring them here, all too anxious to see her.

In some ways it amused her that she retained enough of her mother’s racial heritage to feel this deep, atavistic need for retribution—for justice…Not justice as some people would see it, perhaps, but justice none the less.

The years had developed within her an ability to stand outside herself and observe and analyse.

Four men had taken from her something which she had deeply prized, and now it was only just that those four men should, each of them, lose what they prized most.

Each of the letters was perfectly typed on the thick headed notepaper of the company. Pepper folded them efficiently and put them in the envelopes, using the stamps she had bought especially for this purpose: part of the ritual.

The security guard smiled at her as she walked out into the early summer sunshine. She was his boss and he respected her, but he was still man enough to cast an admiring glance over her indolently curved figure and slim legs as he watched her stepping out into the street.

There was a post box on the corner where she deposited the letters. Her car was parked outside the building, a very dark red Aston Martin Volante with the number plate PSM 1. Pepper unlocked it and swung her body gracefully into the driver’s seat. The upholstery was cream leather, the seat piped in the same dark red as the coachwork. The cream leather hood was electrically operated, and as she started the engine she pressed the button that would lower it.

She drove as she did everything else; with economy and skill. It took her less than half an hour to drive through the traffic to her home in Porchester Mews. A special card was needed to operate the wrought iron gates that guarded the enclosed development. Like her offices, the buildings were Regency. It was one of the most exclusive housing developments in London, a collection of mews houses and apartments constructed round a shared enclosed garden. All the owners and tenants had access to the special sports facilities within the complex. The Olympic-sized swimming pool was one of the most luxurious in London. The gym had all the latest Nautilus equipment, and the squash courts had been designed by the world champion. In addition to her own home Pepper owned an apartment, which she kept for the exclusive use of her clients.

Her house was three storeys high. Downstairs was the drawing room, a dining room and the kitchen. On the first floor were two guest bedrooms with their own bathrooms, and on the top floor were her own private quarters—a huge bedroom, her bathroom, a sitting room, and a dressing room lined on both sides from floor to ceiling with mirrored wardrobes.

Her daily maid had already left. In the fridge was a blender full of the fresh ingredients of her favourite health food drink. Pepper took it out and switched it on. Her figure was the sort that could all too easily take on weight, so she was scrupulous about what she ate and drank. And she did exercise—discreetly.

She thought about the letters while she sipped her drink. Four men about whom she knew more than they knew about themselves. Years of painstaking detail built up layer upon layer until she could almost crawl inside their skulls.

She glanced at her watch. It had a plain gold wafer-thin bracelet and came from the Royal jewellers. She always avoided the obvious. Let others wear their Cartier Santos or their Rolex Oysters; Pepper didn’t need that sort of security. This watch had been specially designed for her and owed nothing to fashion’s whims. She would still be wearing it in twenty years’ time and it would still look good.

Her clothes for the evening were already laid out for her; she had left a note for her maid this morning, telling her what she would wear. She gave the same careful attention and thought to her clothes as she did to everything else, but once she had put them on she put them out of her mind.

Tonight she was wearing a Valentino outfit. Unlike many of the other top designers, Valentino acknowledged that not all women were six foot tall. The suit Pepper was wearing tonight was black—a black velvet skirt cut short and tight, and a black velvet long-sleeved top with a long knitted welt that reached from just under the full curve of her breasts to the top of her hips. The knitted welt was designed to hug her body like a second skin. On anyone with a less than perfect figure it would have been a disaster.

She showered first, luxuriating in the warm spray of the water, stretching under it like a jungle cat. This was the other side of her nature; the one that no one else saw—the sensual, sensitive side. The heat of the water brought out the evocative smell of her perfume. It was the only one she ever wore and it clung to her skin with subtle emphasis.

Pepper stepped out of the shower and patted her skin dry before carefully smoothing in body lotion. At twenty-eight her body must already be ageing, according to the laws of science, but she knew without having to look in the mirror that her flesh was luminously firm and that her body held an allure that few men could resist.

Her mouth tightened over the thought and she tensed abruptly. The male sex and its desire for her was not something about which she cared to think. She had been careful over the years to build up an image of herself as a highly sexual woman. It was an image that was so carefully constructed that as yet no one even thought to challenge it. And no one ever would.

A tiny silvery mark low down on her body caught her eye and she frowned, touching it uneasily with one fingertip. The Valentino clung far too tightly to her to allow for any underwear other than a pair of special stockings that hugged the tops of her legs. She had discovered them in New York long before they had been available in British shops.

While she waited for the body lotion to sink into her skin Pepper padded comfortably about her room. Here, alone in her own home with the doors locked and the windows closed, she felt secure enough to do so, but that security had been a long time in coming, and she was intelligent enough to know that no woman who professed to be as sexually experienced as she chose to appear could afford to seem ill at ease with her own body.

Men were like predators, and they had a predator’s instinct for female weakness. Pepper controlled the shiver that threatened her, tensing until only the tiny hairs on her skin showed any reaction, standing up sharply as though subjected to an ice-cold blast of air. Ignoring her betraying reaction, she put on her makeup with the ease of long habit, re-coiling her hair into a fresh chignon. Round her neck she wore a fine gold chain suspending a single flawless diamond. It nestled in the hollow of her throat, flashing fire against her smooth golden skin. Pepper rarely exposed her body to the sun; holidays were not something that held any appeal for her and a sunbed was far less hazardous to her skin. Her face she never allowed to tan.

At a quarter to seven she let herself out of the house and stepped into her car. The hood was back up. She inserted a tape into the machine in the dashboard and switched it on. As she drove to her destination she listened to the sound of her own voice relating every piece of information they had on file about Carl Viner. It was part of her credo to know everything there was to know about her clients. By the time she handed over her car to the doorman at the Grosvenor, she had virtually memorised the tennis star’s biography.

Over her suit she was wearing a short evening cape of black velvet lined with white mink, spotted in black like ermine. It was pure theatre—a necessary part of the façade she presented to the world, and although Pepper didn’t show it she was humorously aware of the looks people gave her as she walked indolently through the foyer.

One of the staff behind the reception desk recognised her, and within seconds she was being escorted to the suite where the private party was being held.

The party was being hosted and paid for by the manufacturers of the tennis shoes that the young star Carl Viner had agreed to endorse. Pepper had negotiated a six-figure advance payment plus royalties for the deal. She took ten per cent.

Jeff Stowell, the star’s agent, was hovering just inside the door. He grabbed hold of her arm.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.

“Why? It’s exactly seven o’clock, Jeff,” she told him coolly, detaching herself from him and allowing the waiter standing behind her to take her cape. She could see that Jeff was sweating slightly, and she wondered why he was so nervous. He was an ebullient man with a tendency to bully those beneath him. He treated his clients like children, exhorting and coaxing the very best out of them.

“Look, there’s someone here tonight who wants to meet you—Ted Steiner, the yachtsman. He’s with Mark McCormack, but he’s looking for a change.” Jeff saw her frown. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be pleased…”

“I could well be,” Pepper agreed coolly. “Once I know why he’s thinking of leaving McCormack. It’s only six months since he won the Whitbread Challenge Trophy and signed with him. If he’s into drugs and he’s looking to me to supply them he can forget it.”

She saw the dull flush of colour crawl up under the agent’s skin and knew that her information had been correct.

“Moral scruples,” he bluffed.

Pepper shook her head. “No. Financial ones—apart from the obvious potential hassle with the police and the Press, a sports star who’s hooked on drugs doesn’t stay the best in the world for very long, and when he loses that status he loses his earning power, and without that he’s no use to me.”

She stepped past him while Jeff was still pondering on her words and looked round for Carl Viner.

He was fairly easy to find. He liked women and they liked him. Half a dozen or more of them were crowded round him now, tanned long-legged beauties, all blonde, but the moment he saw Pepper walking towards him they lost his attention. He had a well-deserved playboy image and for that reason some of the other agencies were wary of him, but he was shrewd enough to know what would happen if he played too hard, and it was Pepper’s private conviction that he was a definite contender for next year’s Wimbledon title.

Unlike all the other men present, who were wearing formal lounge or dinner suits, he was dressed in tennis whites. His shorts were brief enough to be potentially indecent. His hair was blond and sun-streaked, and fell over his forehead in unruly curls. He was twenty-one and had been playing tennis since he was twelve. He looked like a mischievous six-foot child, all appealing blue eyes and smooth muscles. But in reality he had a mind like a steel trap.

“Pepper!”

He rolled her name round his mouth, caressing it as though he was caressing her skin. As a lover he would be the type of man who liked to kiss and suck. Pepper knew even before his eyes moved in that direction that his tastes ran to women whose breasts were high and full.

One of the blondes clinging to his side pouted, teetering between sulky acceptance of Pepper’s presence and aggressive resentment. Pepper ignored her and looked down at his feet. He was tall and muscular and took a size eleven tennis shoe. The grin he gave her when she lifted her eyes to his face contained pure lust.

“If you want to see if the adage is true, I’m more than happy to oblige.”

The gaggle of blondes erupted into sycophantic giggles. Pepper eyed him coolly.

“You already have,” she told him drily, “but as it happens I was just checking to make sure you’re wearing the sponsor’s shoes.”

Carl Viner’s face reddened like a spoilt child’s. She leaned forward and patted him on the cheek, digging her nails gently into his smooth flesh. “Real women always prefer the subtle to the obvious. Until you’ve learned that you’d better stick to playing with your pretty dolls.”

The sponsors were a relatively new company in the sports footwear field and they had wanted a racy, sophisticated image for their product. Pepper had read about them in the financial press, and it had been she who had approached them. Their financial director had thought that that gave him an edge over her, but she had soon disabused him of that. She already had several tennis shoe manufacturers clamouring with offers of sponsorship. She had never had any intention of allowing her client to accept an offer from anyone but the company she had chosen—they had the soundest financial backing; and they had also designed a shoe whose efficiency and style would soon outstrip the others, but they had allowed Pepper’s self-confidence and coolness to undermine their own faith in themselves, and Alan Hart, their Financial Director, had been forced to back down and accept her terms.

He was here tonight.

There had been a time when he had thought he could get Pepper into bed, and his ego still smarted from her rejection of him.

For a woman who wasn’t very tall, she moved extremely well. Someone had once described the way she walked as a sensual combination of leopardess’s feline, muscled prowl and a snake’s hypnotic sway. It wasn’t a walk she deliberately cultivated; it was the result of generations of proudly independent women.

Alan Hart watched her as she moved gracefully from group to group, and he also watched the effect she had on people around her. Men were dazzled by her, and she used her sexuality like a surgeon with a sharp knife.

“I wonder what she’s like in bed.”

He turned his head and said without smiling to the man standing beside him,

“She’s a tease.”

The other man laughed.

“Are you speaking from personal experience?”

He ignored the question, his eyes following Pepper’s indolent walk.

How had she done it? How had she built up her multi-million-pound empire from less than nothing? For a man to have achieved so much by the time he was thirty would be awe-inspiring enough. For a woman…and one who by her own admission had barely received the most basic sort of formal education, never mind gone to university…

Alan freely acknowledged his own sense of almost savage resentment. Women like Pepper Minesse challenged men too much. His own wife was quite content with her role as his mental and financial inferior. He had given her two children and all the material benefits any woman could possibly want. He was regularly unfaithful to her and thought no more about it than he did about changing his shirt. If he gave it any thought at all he assumed that even if his wife was aware of his infidelities she would never leave him. She would lose too much; she couldn’t support herself, and he had been careful to make sure that she never had more than pin-money to spend. He didn’t know it, but for the last three years his wife had been having an affair with one of his closest friends. He didn’t know it, but Pepper did.

She left after she had got what she had come for—a tentative offer of sponsorship for one of her other clients; a boy from the back streets of Liverpool who was one day going to win a gold medal for his speed on the running track.

The preliminary skirmishes were over; now the hard bargaining would begin. It was a game in which Pepper was a skilled player.

In a London sorting office, electronic machinery relentlessly checked and despatched the unending sacks of mail, and four letters slid into their appropriate slots.

It had begun. On the chessboard of life the pieces were being moved into position.