“Hunter.” Just saying his name was painful. “You’re alive, then.”
“No need to sound so happy about it.”
“I’m not happy about it. You’re a fucking arsehole.”
“Now, that’s not kind. You know the only way I got through the last year was by imagining you naked, with those perfect legs of yours wrapped around my waist. Remember Stockholm?”
“No,” said Sally. “The only way I got through the last year was by imagining you chained to a wall in some godforsaken Group 99 hideout with a pair of electrodes glued to your bollocks.”
Hunter laughed. “I missed you.”
“They let you go, then?”
“Actually I escaped.”
Now it was Sally’s turn to laugh. “Bullshit! You have about as many survival skills as a hedgehog trying to shuffle across the M40.”
“I’ve improved.” Hunter sounded wounded. “I did have a little help from my fellow countrymen. At the beginning.”
Through her drunken haze, Sally read through the lines. “You mean, you were there? In the Bratislava camp?”
“I was there,” Hunter confirmed.
“And they left you behind?” she asked, incredulous.
“Not exactly,” Hunter admitted. “I made a run for it.”
Sally slid down the wall and sat on the floor. “What? Why?”
“It’s a long story.”
A torrent of emotions rushed through her. The strongest was relief that Hunter was alive. He’d broken her heart into a million tiny pieces when he left her for that slut Fiona at the New York Times. But even Sally didn’t want to see pieces of his skull flying through the air like poor Bob Daley’s.
Hot on the heels of relief was excitement. The whole world was out there looking for Hunter Drexel and speculating about his fate. And she, Sally Faiers, was on the phone with him, listening with him tell her that he’d run from his American rescuers—that President Havers’s statement had been an out-and-out lie! Talk about a scoop!
Reaching up, she grabbed a pencil and pad from the hall table.
“Where are you?”
“Sorry,” said Hunter, sounding nothing of the sort. “Can’t tell you that.”
“Give me a clue at least.”
“And you can’t tell anyone about this phone call either.”
Sally laughed. “Fuck off. This is front-page news. The minute you hang up I’m calling the news desk.”
“Sally, I mean it, you can’t say anything.” Hunter’s voice was deadly serious all of a sudden. “If they find me they’ll kill me.”
“If who finds you?” Sally asked.
“Never mind that now,” Hunter cut her off. “I need you to do me a favor.”
It was astonishing how quickly relief could turn to anger. “In what alternate universe would I do you a favor?” Sally asked.
“I need you to do some digging for me,” Hunter said ignoring her. “You remember the Greek prince who was found strung up at Sandhurst?”
“Sure. Achileas. The suicide. Hunter, you aren’t seriously telling me you’re working on a story right now? Because …”
“I don’t think it was suicide,” Hunter interrupted her. “There’s a senior officer at Sandhurst, Major General Frank Dorrien. I need you to find out anything you can about him.”
Sally paused. “You think this Dorrien guy murdered Prince Achileas of Greece? Are you on drugs?”
“Just look into it,” Hunter said. “Please.”
“Tell me where you are and I’ll think about it,” said Sally.
“Thanks. You’re an angel.”
“Hey, I didn’t say yes! Hunter?”
“You’re breaking up.” He started making ridiculous, crackling noises down the phone.
“I am not breaking up. Hunter! Don’t you dare hang up on me. I swear to God, if you hang up now I’m gonna call the CIA right this minute and tell them about this call. Every word. And then I’ll run the story in tomorrow’s Times.”
“No you won’t,” said Hunter.
He hung up.
Sally Faiers sat naked in her hallway for a long time with the phone in her hand.
“Fuck you, Hunter Drexel,” she said aloud.
You ripped my heart out. You utterly betrayed me. And now you expect me to sit on the biggest story of my career, and quietly go out and do your dirty work for you on some wild-goose-chase, bullshit story at Sandhurst?
“I’m not doing it,” Sally shouted down the empty hall of her flat. “Not this time.”
But she already knew that she would.
HUNTER HUNG UP THE PAY PHONE and stepped out into the howling wind.
How he wished he were in London with Sally! Preferably in bed. He found himself getting hard at the thought of her. Those legs. Those phenomenal tits … What had possessed him to leave her in the first place?
She’s right, he thought. I am an asshole.
He looked around him miserably. Up and down the litter-strewn street, poorly dressed people dived into ugly concrete apartment buildings or offices or cafés, anything to get out of the cold. The few poor souls forced to wait at bus stops huddled together miserably, like sheep en route to the abattoir, stomping their feet and smoking and clapping their gloved hands together repeatedly against the bitter weather.
Romania was a beautiful country. But Oradea, the city where Hunter had spent the last three days, was a dump, full of abandoned, communist architecture and depressed, unemployed people. The hospitals were stuffed full of abandoned children, and filthy Roma families roamed the streets like animals, some of them actually sleeping on top of mounds of rubbish, left to rot or freeze or drink themselves to death.
If Romania’s a supermodel, Hunter thought, Oradea is the pimple on her ass. There was none of the beauty of Transylvania here, none of the sophistication of Bucharest. No sign anywhere of the much talked about economic revival. Wherever Romania’s EU millions had been spent, it wasn’t here. Oradea felt like a forgotten city. But that made it perfect for Hunter Drexel. Right now Hunter needed to be forgotten. No one would look for him here.
Not that there was no money to be found in Oradea. In the Old Town, along the banks of the Crisul Repede river, a few magnificent mansions, relics of the pre-communist days, had been reclaimed by wealthy private owners. Stuffed with fine art and priceless antiques, their formal gardens lined with lavender bushes and neatly clipped hedges, these homes glittered like stars in an otherwise pitch-black sky, sparkling incongruously like newly cut diamonds dropped in a pile of manure. Their owners were mostly native Romanians, gangsters, corrupt local government officials, and a smattering of legitimate businessmen, some returning to their hometown now after years of exile abroad.
It was in one of these houses that Hunter was staying. Its owner, a property magnate by the name of Vasile Rinescu, was a keen poker player and a friend of sorts.
“If you’re here to play, you’re welcome,” Vasile told Hunter, when the latter had arrived, shivering and desperate, on his doorstep. “I don’t know about blood, but poker