Jack Higgins Read Free

trouble.”
    â€œYou worry too much.” I gave him the bottle. “Have another drink and take us into harbour.”
    Perhaps if I’d listened to him, given it some thought, things might have turned out differently, but her perfume was heavy in my nostrils, the sound of the voice sharp and clear, the eyes grey as mist on an Irish morning. She had me by the throat and I could not, would not shake free of her.

two
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD
    Only the Egyptians, with their curious love-hate relationship where the English are concerned, could have allowed the continued existence, especially after Suez, of a hotel with a name like Saunder’s.
    But then the entire establishment was something of an anachronism. A throwback to the great days of Victorian Imperialism and it consistently refused to move with the times. No air conditioning for Saunder’s. Enormous electric fans turned monotonously in each room except when there was a power failure which was often.
    It was run by a man called Yanni Kytros, Greek by nationality, but with an Egyptian mother, which was useful. He had another place on Kyros in the Aegean, north of Crete through the Kasos Strait, and seemed to split his time between the two.
    He was the kind of man who had his fingers into everything. An operator in capital letters. Women, guns, cigarettes. You name it, he could supply it. The one thing he wouldn’t touch was drugs. Something to dowith a sister who’d got hooked on heroin years before and had died unpleasantly. He told me a little about her on one memorable night of women and drink when we were both three parts cut. He had never mentioned it since.
    He was about fifty, which I always understood was a pure estimate as he didn’t seem to be able to lay his hands on a birth certificate. Bearded, genial, badly overweight and constantly smiling, one of the wittiest men I’ve ever known, and underneath it all, utterly unscrupulous and hard as nails.
    Although I ran my main operation out of Alexandria, I liked Bir el Gafani so much that I’d been living there on a semi-permanent basis for almost two years. I had a room on the ground floor at Saunder’s with a terrace to the garden which suited me perfectly and a regular mooring for the Gentle Jane in the old harbour. Morgan usually slept on board when he wasn’t sweating it off in the corner of some bar or other.
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    I couldn’t remember actually getting into bed, but in it I was or rather, on it and mother-naked. The room was a place of shadows, white muslin curtains billowing palely at the windows open to the terrace. It was evening and very quiet. It was several moments before I realised that the fan had stopped.
    I pushed myself up on one elbow, reaching for a cigarette on the wickerwork table beside the bed, and there was a stirring in the shadows on the other side of the room, the chink of a bottle.
    â€œYou okay, Jack?”
    Morgan got off the divan by the far window andmoved out of the shadows, stowing the bottle furtively away in the pocket of his old reefer.
    â€œFine, Morg,” I said. “What happened?”
    â€œYou passed out, Jack, fainted clean away, just like you done before. Remember?”
    I nodded slowly. It wasn’t something that happened often, but when it did, was complete enough to be alarming. I’d gone into the whole matter thoroughly with a specialist some years previously who had told me it was some kind of stress ailment, but chemical rather than psychological. It seemed I had unusual reserves of vitality, could keep going full-blast for longer periods than the average man, but when I reached a certain point I keeled straight over, burned out.
    â€œWhen did all this happen?”
    â€œComing in through the garden. I left the Land Rover at the side gate. You had an arm round my shoulders. Just as we reached the fountain you went down so hard you took me with you.”
    â€œHow did you get me