Death of an Adept

"How good of you to come," he said, rising gracefully from the leather-upholstered depths of his chair. His smile was slow and lazy, dangerous. "Welcome to my humble abode."

Angela ignored both the irony and the veiled menace in his greeting as she flounced into the room, the houseboy withdrawing with alacrity to close the door behind him.

"This had better be important," she said. "By your own account, it isn't safe for any of us to be seen together, here or anywhere else."

Francis Raeburn elevated a blond eyebrow in mild irritation as he waved her to one of the three lyre-backed chairs opposite the desk and resumed his own seat.

"We aren't exactly going to be seen together," he answered, settling back to steeple his fingers before him. "And the house is of sufficient architectural interest that, as a reporter, you can certainly claim a legitimate reason for being here. Besides that, there are sufficient safeguards in place that I think you need not worry about being discovered in my company."

"You mean Barclay, with his ridiculous pistol?" she retorted.

"You are well aware that Mr. Barclay has other talents at his disposal. The pistol is the least of our defenses, though it and he would serve their purpose, if required. But as long as you are under this roof, I promise that you are in no danger of discovery."

"I certainly hope not," she muttered. "I don't want to end up like Kavanagh, with a headline for an obituary: 'Suspected terrorist found dead in prison: Police report no leads.' "

Raeburn began idly rearranging some of the items on the desktop before him. Fluid and precise, his movements called attention to the handsome carnelian lynx ring that he, too, was wearing.

"Kavanagh was a competent operative, but he had a somewhat inflated notion of his own abilities," he said coolly. "He was warned that a Hunting Lodge might try to interfere. When they showed up, he should have known better than to try and cross swords with them single-handed."

"So he made an error in judgement. Was that any reason to leave him where Dorje's operatives would have no trouble finding him?"

"And what would you have had me do?" Raeburn asked. "Stage a jailbreak on his behalf? You know as well as I do, that would have left a trail so conspicuous that even those witless clods who pass for ordinary policemen might have been able to track us down. No, I had the welfare of the rest of us to consider - a fact for which I should think you would be grateful!"

The Kavanagh to whom they were referring had been arrested the previous spring during an attempt to salvage a Nazi treasure trove from a submarine left hidden in a sea cave on the northwest coast of Ireland. While the trove had included a sizeable cache of diamonds, their immense worth had been negligible compared to the accompanying chest of manuscripts on Tibetan black magic.

Recovery of the items had been commissioned by a man called Dorje, shadowy superior of an obscure Buddhist monastery tucked deep in the Swiss Alps, whose inner cadre of initiates recognized him as the current incarnation of an infamous black Adept known to Tibetan legend as the Man with Green Gloves. Born Siegfried Hasselkuss, the product of Nazi selective breeding, Dorje's esoteric resources seemed to support that claim; and recovery of the knowledge contained in the manuscripts, called Terma or "treasure texts,'' would have redoubled his already formidable powers.

Raeburn himself was no novice in such matters; but neither was he a match for Dorje. Drafted by Dorje to undertake the salvage operation - and in expiation for a previous venture gone wrong - Raeburn had reluctantly agreed to accept a share in the diamonds as payment for his services, fully intending to appropriate the Terma texts for himself if a suitable opportunity arose.

But the recovery operation had been thwarted by agents of a secret enforcement organization known as the Hunting Lodge, themselves practitioners of esoteric disciplines no less potent than those of Raeburn or Dorje. Raeburn had narrowly escaped with a share of the diamonds, but only at the expense of betraying his Tibetan handlers, abandoning the manuscripts, and leaving the luckless Kavanagh to be arrested by conventional law enforcement authorities on charges of terrorism.

Nor had Kavanagh languished long in jail before being found dead in his cell, of causes yet to be explained by medical science but which Raeburn had no doubt could be laid at the feet of the vengeful Dorje. Lacking the occult resources to combat his former employer on equal terms, at least for the present, Raeburn had temporarily dispersed his own followers and gone into hiding, leaving his associates to find what safety they could while he himself went searching for the means to shift the balance of power in his favor.

Angela's expression was stormy as she contemplated a well-manicured thumbnail.