Derrida was, like Chopin, half French and half Polish. From her French father she had inherited her Pascal-like rationality; she never bet, unless it was on a sure thing. From her Polish mother she got her blond good looks. The first time he had seen her, at a concert in Singapore, he had been struck by her willowy figure, the way the breeze moved over her dress and sent it clinging to her body, hugging her in a way that every man desired but no man would ever obtain. No matter: he had hired her on the spot.
Not that his was any life for a young person. Under his arrangement with Tyler, he had escaped the full wrath of the USA, but only under the condition that he stay confined to his home in Liechtenstein, or to those countries without a politically controversial extradition treaty with the United States. And yet she had accepted his offer unhesitatingly, as if there was something that she, too, was fleeing. Not that he had asked—other people’s troubles were none of his business, only his opportunities. But Mlle. Derrida needed the handsome salary he paid her, and he needed her, and that was that.
But not, he confessed to himself privately, the way he needed Amanda Harrington.
In these past nine months, he had thought often of Amanda Harrington. Of all the women in his life, of all the women he had known, she was the acme. When he heard that she had survived the poisoned chalice he had offered her, he had spared no expense on her treatment and recovery. He saw to it that, every day, her rooms were filled with roses, that she wanted for nothing, that as she progressed everything would be provided for, that her home in London would be taken care of. He gave her everything. The only thing he could not give her was the child she had loved briefly, and then lost. But, then, he could always try again. He was still potent, and in every respect. And now he would see her again. Things would be as they once had been.
“We are approaching Macao, sir,” she said.
Next to Dubai, Macao was one of his favorite places in the world. For an internationalist like Emanuel Skorzeny, the world really was pretty much his oyster, even if that oyster had been severely limited by the informal, unacknowledged sanctions Tyler had imposed on him in the wake of the EMP fiasco. Macao was the old Portuguese settlement on the southwest coast of China, dating back to the early 16th century. Along with the Portuguese foothold in Nagasaki, Macao was where the West had begun in its penetration of the East. Now, of course, it was the East that was penetrating the West.
“Thank you, Mlle. Derrida,” he said. “Please ensure that everything is in readiness for our arrival.”
“Indeed, sir,” she replied. She gave him a little smile—was it of encouragement? Advancement? Impossible to tell. He smiled back, neutrally, he hoped. Everything was a lawsuit these days; it was getting to be that a man couldn’t make an honest living as a pirate anymore.
Which is what both perplexed him and animated him. What had happened to the secure world he had once known? True, it had never existed, except in his own idealistic imagination, but that did not make it any less real. From his boyhood in a Sippenhaft camp in northern Germany near Lübeck—Sieglinde’s aria, Der Männer sippe was for him the most resonant part of Wagner’s Ring—through his Wanderjähren as a young man, to his arrival in Paris, to his first million on the trading floor of the DAX, he had held fast to his vision.
“Music,” he said, and as if on command, Elgar’s Enigma Variations came over the aircraft’s loudspeakers. One of the things he most liked about Mlle. Derrida was that she could read his mind. Something Pilier could never quite do.
The Boeing 707—the kind of planes they used to use for long-range international travel back in the early ’80s, when the Aught Seven was the last word in aircraft—bumped a little, then settled down. In its original configuration, it was basically a flying cigar tube with two rows of three seats on either side of a center aisle; in his specially outfitted version, he had reserved the entire center section of the aircraft, the safest part over the wings, for his own private quarters.
Toward the front, between him and the pilots, was the communications headquarters. Despite everything that had happened, he had maintained most of his agreements with international air controllers and national satellite systems, which meant that he could still monitor the position of every aircraft in the Skorzeny fleet, no matter how temporarily diminished in numbers. To the rear were the sleeping quarters, both his and the staff’s, and behind them, the galley and his personal chef’s quarters. He hadn’t yet made up his mind about Mlle. Derrida; she might prove to be more trouble than she was worth. But, fortunately for him, there were no sexual harassment laws at 40,000 feet.
Skorzeny let the music wash over him. A “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” That about summed it up. Most of the idiots who had inherited Western culture thought of Elgar—if they ever thought of him at all, which was doubtful—as a kind of Sherlockian Col. Blimp, a weird doppelgänger of King George V, the clueless monarch who torpedoed his country, his Empire, into the trenches of the Somme, with results that were now distressingly visible.
Enigma. The Morse Code of the principal theme. Two shorts, two longs. Followed by two longs and two shorts. In code: I am. Am I. The question mark practically screamed its presence. Man’s existential dilemma, made aural in music. “I am. Am I?”
Emanuel Skorzeny was a confirmed atheist, and had been since he watched his mother and father executed in the late winter of 1944. A God that could kill one’s family was capable of any enormity, and was one not worthy of worship. Just as the West, in its present incarnation, was not worthy of redemption.
The ninth variation sounded throughout the airplane. No matter how he steeled his heart, it always moved him. Nimrod, the Hunter. So appropriate. And followed by Dorabella, Elgar’s secret love, to whom he wrote coded communications, both musical and literary. What was he trying to say to “Dorabella,” Miss Dora Penny?
“Sir?” Mlle. Derrida startled him. “Are you quite all right?”
“I’m quite all right, Mlle. Derrida, yes, thank you,” he said, in a tone that warned: never interrupt me en rêve.
“We’re preparing for final descent.”
“I am always prepared for final descent, Mlle. Derrida,” he said. “You would be well advised to do the same.”
The plane’s wheels touched down at Macao International Airport with as little disturbance as possible. Skorzeny prided himself on being able to find and hire pilots who made landing an art form. Instead of proceeding to the main terminal, however, the plane diverted onto a secondary runway, heading for a small collection of hangars well away from the main flight paths.
Mlle. Derrida rose and began to prepare the cabin for exit, but Skorzeny remained seated, still listening to the music, and relaxed even farther back into his chair. “You know the old saying, don’t you?” he inquired idly.
“I’m sure I don’t, M. Skorzeny,” his attendant replied.
“If Mohammed will not come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed.”
Mlle. Derrida froze. Any talk of Mohammed made her uncomfortable. Being relatively new, she was not sure exactly what Skorzeny’s religious views were, or whether he had any at all, but she was young enough and educated enough to know that, these days, one did not lightly discuss the Prophet. Bohemond, Charles Martel, Sobieski, and the rest of them were moldering in their graves, and yet the Messenger of God lived on; one spoke of the Prophet at one’s own peril. “Sir?” she inquired.
“I mean, Mlle. Derrida, that Mr. Arash Kohanloo will be meeting with me here, in my aeroplane. Chef, I believe, will have the meal ready in 15 minutes.” He let the look
