The Triple Goddess Read Free

disagreements that Stace had avoided, thanks to early warnings and the precautions he took. If an emergency were to be announced on the pink-spotted telephone in his office, his lordship would leave for the airport, where his custom-fitted mid-air refuellable AWACS plane, stocked with physic from the converted armoury that was her father’s medicine cabinet, was on permanent stand-by to whisk him away and fly round the world until it was safe to return. At especially hazardous times, Stace had access to a decommissioned NASA spacecraft in which he would orbit the earth.
    In less severe situations, when there was only a low-grade alert, he would take a helicopter to his mountain-top retreat, and breathe the pure air there; or spend days submerged in a diving-bell on the Continental Shelf. Sometimes he operated from a Saharan compound amidst the Bedouin and caravanserais, striding up and down and bellowing instructions in the air-conditioned coolth under refractive tinted glass, or from a non-allergenic divan. The baron knew when to go north to the germ-free Arctic, where he had his own igloo, a grand and spacious affair, and south for warmth without humidity to dry his lungs.
    At home, throughout Stace’s London headquarters, and even in his car, the air was filtered, frozen, and then reheated to the correct temperature with an infusion of cell-friendly antioxidants and nutrients. Consequently, amongst the domestic staff at Eaton Square either the cook or the housemaid always had a cold, which she was at great pains to conceal: one audible sternutation—there were sneeze and cough detectors throughout the house—god forbid that it should be near food or a toothbrush, and she would be at the Job Centre without a character reference.
    The only downstairs member of the household who was never unwell was Sanders the valet: Sanders inhaled so many chemical fumes in the dry-cleaning plant in the basement—it was hermetically sealed and there was a decontamination zone at the entrance—that anything trespassing upon his system was annihilated.
    Stace’s formal education had ended early and his business career begun before his character had had a chance to mature. He was unable to make social chit-chat or express himself in other than professional terms. But his lack of people skills had not held him back from becoming a renowned entrepreneur. His balance sheets had always shown huge profits. Amongst the companies in his financial empire a number had received King’s Awards for Industry. He prided himself on his uncanny ability to assess the viability of a commercial venture as accurately as the barometers registered the atmospheric pressure at his premises and the thermometer did his own temperature.
    If one thought about it, and it would have been a sad fact that so few did, had it not brought him such advantage over them, adherence to his methods was a guarantee of success. So many people envied his lordship, and yet if only they were to imitate his work ethic they could not fail to prosper—not to the degree that he had, of course, but enough to ensure their financial security and independence. Knowing this would have made Stace feel positively charitable, had he not regarded philanthropy and those who practised it so negatively.
    All of the baron’s operational outposts, naturally, bristled with computer and telecommunications equipment. Satellites beamed life-size holograms of his lordship’s corpus into his London headquarters, so that his minions should never think that he was not in control, and monitoring their activities on his behalf; and sometimes what they did with their leisure time as well. A former chief executive who was yukking it up with a hostess at the Miranda Club off Carnaby Street in Soho at two o’clock in the morning had been dismayed to find Lord Stace sitting in his lap and informing him that he had just joined the ranks of the unemployed...though at the time his boss was verifiably in