Shock Warning

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Amanda Harrington had already decided that she would prefer to be cremated than buried when she felt Maryam’s coffin move. Even for a corpse, being nailed inside a box was no way to enter the afterlife.

Then she heard the voices, muffled, male. She could not understand the words, but she knew curses when she heard them. And when one of the men dropped his end of the coffin and she very nearly toppled over, the imprecations and oaths were unmistakable.

They loaded her into some sort of vehicle — she doubted if it was a hearse — and then she felt the motor start and they were on their way. But where?

She had lost track of time. The coffin was too narrow for her to see the display on her PDA and she wouldn’t have wanted to use it anyway. At first she tried to sleep, but how could you sleep in a place like this when you weren’t already dead? It was the fear of death that kept you awake. From time to time she supposed she must have dozed and she found herself half-wishing she might have a shot of the fugu fish poison once more, just to make the torture a little more endurable.

He must know that something was wrong by now. She tried to imagine his reaction, just for the small pleasure it gave her. That he eventually would kill her, she had no doubt. Death was something to which she’d condemned herself with her affair with Milverton. But he couldn’t just murder her; no, he needed her submission first, her groveling apology, her protestations of eternal fidelity. Emanuel Skorzeny could endure many things, but abandonment was something he simply could not accept.

What would he do? Go ahead with his plan, she supposed. She was never entirely clear on what was going to happen to Maryam once they’d arrived in Tehran — she was being traded to the mullahs for something, but what? So now, like a nude girl popping out of a cake at a bachelor party, she would be the surprise guest at whatever event was scheduled.

She steeled herself. Yes, steeled. She loved that fine old English expression, now sadly fallen into disuse. No one steeled herself anymore; instead they whined and complained and begged and sniveled. St. George wasn’t interested in slaying the dragon and rescuing the damsel in distress anymore; he’d rather get drunk with his mates and beat the crap out of some queers.

No more stop-and-go traffic. The car was moving along an open road. They were out of the city. So it wasn’t to be Tehran after all? Where?

She could not possibly imagine.