The Crasher Read online

  CHAPTER TWO

  860 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA, NEW YORK CITY

  Johnny Peet would never admit it, but the intensity of Dolores’s moods, her volatility or seismicity, as he liked to describe it to himself, always turned him on.

  Perhaps it was because she was the antithesis of his very proper, low-key mother, Catherine Ponsoby Peet, who, in and out of the hospital with a tricky heart valve, never complained, although she had plenty to complain about. Perhaps it was because he’d inherited from his father, at least, the desire to live dangerously, if nothing else.

  Whatever it was, although his common sense occasionally warned him his parents were right and Dolores could easily lead him over a precipice, tonight, as on many nights, his common sense was nowhere to be found.

  He was already excited with the events of the day, so much so he realized he could even be reckless enough to talk to Dolores about spending the rest of their lives together.

  In the hallway of her exotic East River apartment, sublet from a Third-World member of the U.N., she’d met him like a tigress, spitting out her fury that he was half an hour late, although punctuality was hardly what she was known for.

  He’d recognized the signs. Tonight, the fourth night of the new year, she was dying to be tamed… and he’d been dying to tame her, on the floor just inside her front door, before he’d even thrown off his overcoat, across the bar in the living room, where she’d run, pretending to ignore him, pouring herself a glass of champagne, and finally on one of her own prized Chinese Chippendale dining chairs, where he’d pulled her to sit astride him, and where they’d rocked together so violently as they came, the chairback cracked with a sound like a rifle shot.

  Now she lay langorous, still, on the white suede chaise longue in her bedroom. Naked, she was as white as the suede, as white and as curvaceous as a swan, Johnny thought, and just as unpredictable.

  Unlike most women he’d known, Dolores had never sunbathed and the pallor and smoothness of her skin from top to toe showed it, emphasizing the black curls surrounding her head like a halo and the tiny neat triangle of black pubic hair, which, she’d told him more than once, she would let grow into a beautiful bush just for him—he had only to say the word.

  Even after such a wild hour, his penis reacted to her lightness and darkness, but he wasn’t ready again, yet. He looked forward to the next game she would most likely play, acting like an innocent, aloof little princess, making him wait for it, hoping he would even beg a little.

  Before that, he had something to tell her, something to discuss, and on the phone she’d said, in her usual mysterious Mata Hari manner, she had something to discuss with him, too.

  He went to the bar to get more champagne and grinned at the unholy mess they’d made as they’d wrestled to find each other, sweeping everything on the countertop to the floor, an upturned bottle of Cristal still dripping out its contents.

  He cleaned up and took another bottle from the fridge. Dolores only drank Cristal. Dolores wanted and expected only the best. It was one of their major problems. She wouldn’t even consider flying business class, anywhere, let alone coach.

  He came back to the bedroom with two glasses. She was reading Time magazine. “Recognize her?” she said.

  He gave her a glass and, sitting on the chaise longue at her feet, looked at a full-length photograph of a stunning Brunhilde of a woman in a bikini, only her face hidden in shadow.

  “Yes, I do…” He looked at the caption. The name meant nothing to him. He laughed. “I recognize the face…”

  Dolores pinched him hard.

  “All right, all right. I recognize the body. Once seen, never forgotten. I know we’ve met, but I can’t remember where or who she is and frankly right now, Ms. Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.”

  Dolores made a soft, purrlike sound, which meant she was sated with sex and happy. “I’m glad you don’t remember her. I thought you were bowled over by her when I introduced you last summer. Then she was called Rosa Brueckner, but apparently that wasn’t her real name. If you read the story you’ll understand why.”

  Johnny lazily lay back, his eyes closed, in heaven, feeling Dolores’s softness, inhaling the strange, slightly orangey, slightly musky fragrance made specifically for her in Paris by someone she said made fragrances for Chanel. “I don’t want to read any goddamn Time articles… I don’t want to read anything right now. Would any man in his right mind?” He reached back and made contact with her perfect, full nipple, massaging it until, as he guessed she would, she pushed his hand away.

  “What did you want to discuss?”

  He sat up and clinked his glass against hers. “Next! magazine has been after me again. Don’t know why. Certainly not because of my tell-all stories from Albany…”

  Dolores giggled. She knew only too well she’d come back into his life just in time to disrupt it. For more than eighteen months, it had cost him a fortune trying to keep in touch with her, commuting to the city from upstate New York, often to find she was out with somebody else.

  All the same he’d tried to follow his father’s advice and turn the place into a story, but the result was that the Albany Bureau, thank God, had gone to someone more worthy.

  He’d been lucky. Between the Gulf War and the drug wars in Colombia, his father had been too busy to pay much attention, and by the time his periscope focused again on his only son and heir, Johnny had found himself some kind of niche on the paper, working for the Weekend section, writing profiles or stories, like the one appearing yesterday, about fashionable food in the nineties, post-nouvelle cuisine.

  Dolores was playing with his hair. He hoped he was wrong and there wasn’t the beginning of a bald spot at the back; even more, he hoped she wouldn’t find it.

  “So what did they say?”

  “I had lunch there today. Beautiful offices, beautiful girls…”

  She removed her hand abruptly. He grabbed it back and put her fingers in his mouth. “Mmmm, delicious! Nobody as beautiful as you, my swan.” He sat up to drink more champagne. “It’s a little like a ballet, this job market. Two steps forward, two steps back. This is about the third call I’ve had asking me to come in… so this time I went and round and round the conversation went… ‘We like your recent Weekend pieces,’ one says… ‘We know you know the world,’ another guy says. ‘Are you interested in investigative pieces, like your father… or would you like a regular people profile type of assignment?’ ‘Look, you asked me to lunch,’ I said. ‘What do you have in mind?’”

  “Did they talk about money?” Dolores was shocked, or so she said, by how little she considered he received from the Times. “Pocket money,” she called it.

  “The ball’s in my court. They’ve asked me to come up with a proposal.”

  “So come up with one… a million dollars a year with no limit on expenses…”

  Johnny laughed, although he knew Dolores was totally serious. She was so far off the ground, no wonder his parents disapproved.

  The idea of working for Next!, which was fast becoming a hot read, intrigued and excited him, although how he would ever break the news to his father—that he might consider leaving the Times for such an upstart magazine—was beyond his comprehension. But then, with no promotion in sight, he didn’t know how long he could go on doing what he was doing at the paper. The idea of his own column… investigative reporting… covering what he wanted to cover, instead of following orders from a female editor who didn’t bother to conceal her lack of admiration for his work; who wouldn’t be intrigued, excited?

  Dolores pulled his hair. “Listen to me, Johnny, ask for a million and maybe you’ll get seven fifty and in return you’ll investigate and…”

  He turned to bury his face in her neat little triangle, his tongue on its own tour of investigation.

  She tried to push him away, but she showed she didn’t really want to.

  It wasn’t until about one-thirty they thought about dinner. As far as Dolores was concerned that
meant Le Cirque or La Grenouille or, at this time of night, caviar, foie gras, and more Cristal from the fridge.

  Johnny picked up Time as she went to the kitchen. Wow! Now he remembered Madame Brueckner and yes, he had been bowled over. He’d been in the Hamptons with Dolores and gone to one of her Latino multimillionaires’ estates for lunch.

  La Brunhilde Brueckner had been one of the guests, and Dolores and she had fallen into each other’s arms like long-lost sisters, although it turned out they’d only met a couple of years before, when Dolores had been living part of the time in Los Angeles. She’d told him Rosa wasn’t a playgirl. On the contrary. Apparently she was considered to be one of the most brilliant financial consultants around.

  So what piece of business had she landed to merit attention from Time? As Johnny began to read, his interest grew. This was the kind of story he would have given anything to write. This was the kind of story every journalist would want to go after. Indeed, Rosa Brueckner wasn’t a playgirl and besides that, her interest in the richest of the rich had nothing to do with making more money for herself.

  Rosa Brueckner, the story revealed, was an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, working under this pseudonym for two and a half terror-filled years, operating a sophisticated money-laundering operation on the West Coast, through a network of bank accounts and shell companies. So successful had her double life been, she had penetrated the cocaine industry more deeply than any DEA agent before her, leading to the recent arrest of Luis Uchobo, top money manager for the drug lords of Cali, Colombia.

  “Brueckner’s triumph is a milestone for women in federal law enforcement,” Johnny read, “boosting the morale of her sister agents, much as the performance of military women during Desert Storm buoyed their female colleagues.”

  “This is incredible, swan.” Johnny took the magazine into the kitchen. “Is she really a friend of yours? I’d love to see her again.”

  Dolores stuck out her tongue. “I bet you would.”

  “No, seriously… according to this piece she’s been married for quite a few years to someone in the DEA, but she pulled off something few people ever live to see, trapping all those murderous drug guys…”

  Dolores finished arranging a container of Beluga in a well of crushed ice. “I know, I can hardly believe it. It sounds as if everything was just a front… her gorgeous home in Beverly Hills, her jet…”

  “Jet?”

  “Yes, jet!” Dolores’s dark eyes opened wide in appreciation. “It was gorgeous—in green and gold. She gave me a lift once to Vegas, said she was meeting some men who had more money than Fort Knox. I wanted her to introduce me…” Dolores smiled at Johnny coquettishly. “Before you swept me off my feet, of course, but she said they were too deadly.” She gave a mock shiver. “I thought she meant deadly boring… but I guess from reading this she meant it literally.”

  “In a way, I can’t believe Time running this story. Her mission may be accomplished, nabbing this big fish for the government, but surely she’ll have to pay for it now everyone knows who she really is.”

  “That’s what I thought, but they don’t give her real name and you can’t see her face…”

  Dolores giggled again, as Johnny pretended to reel back. “Who needs a name or a face with a body like that staring out of the page? Next time we go to California, can we look her up?”

  “She may not even live there anymore. In any case, she’s married… so don’t get any ideas…”

  One idea was still uppermost in his mind: to make a commitment to Dolores. But something held him back.

  “I wonder if my father knows her?”

  “I’m sure he does, baby. I thought you said your father knows everybody.”

  Johnny promised himself he’d ask him at the next opportunity. Time had broken this big story, but that wasn’t the end of it, he was sure. With somebody as intrepid as Rosa Brueckner, there would be other missions, other mountains to climb, other incredible stories to write. For Next!? Why not?

  As they ate and drank, Johnny held Dolores’s hand and occasionally leaned across to kiss her. “What did you want to tell me, swan?”

  She looked sorrowfully at the piece of foie gras on toast she held in her perfectly manicured fingers.

  There was a dramatic silence he knew he wasn’t expected to break.

  When she raised her beautiful head to look at him, her eyes were liquid with tears, but even that didn’t warn him of what she was about to say. “I’m broke, Johnny. I’ve run out of money, my inheritance. I don’t know how it happened. I’m not even sure I can pay my rent next month and…” A tear rolled down her pale cheek. “I think I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby in the summer…”

  Over three thousand miles away, outside Lausanne, in a small, private Swiss clinic, Time magazine had just been delivered to Suite 42/43.

  Although the occupant of the suite, the clinic’s most important patient by far, could have written the story himself, give or take a few unimportant details, his eyes, the only part of his face not hidden by bandages, followed every word slowly, painstakingly, as if to memorize them.

  He’d never met Rosa Brueckner, although her name had come up once or twice over the past couple of years. It was easy to say no woman would ever fool him, but he seriously doubted it. It was the oldest problem in the world. The reason regimes that had everything going for them, from Perón’s Argentina to Hitler’s Germany, collapsed. Greed. Too much, too easily, too fast. People at the top got lazy, slack and, zap, it was over.

  He’d been expecting something like this Brueckner-Uchobo fiasco since that asshole Pablo Gavira turned himself in to the Colombian authorities on the promise he wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S. The American press had gone orgasmic over the story, with that fucking correspondent, Quentin Peet, who thought he was a cross between Sir Galahad and James Bond, divulging that Pablo, the idiot, was being held “in his hometown of Engivado, ten miles from Medellin, in a ‘prison’ so luxurious, Buckingham Palace might be found wanting in comparison.”

  Gavira would have to be exterminated; Uchobo, too, if the chance came up. As for the Brueckners of the world, death was too pleasant a punishment for them. There were other, more meaningful kinds of living-death to remind them to stay out of other people’s business.

  He’d been promised the bandages would be off today. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, which surprised and relieved the highly qualified plastic surgeon entrusted with the job.

  No one had expected him to be such a model patient, forced because of his special circumstances to stay in one place for nearly ten days, but he enjoyed being unpredictable. It kept people on their toes, and after the first painful seventy-two hours, he’d realized it was the first time in years he’d had plenty of time to think, to plan.

  Outside his corner suite sat Hugo Humphrey, six feet eight inches of brute force, whose handshake was enough to give those chosen to experience it nightmares for months. Hugo had been with him in the operating theater to ensure the surgeon kept his word and used only a local anesthetic.

  “Surgery is performed inside the nose under a local anesthetic to prevent the patient from bleeding as much as he would under a general anesthetic. This also keeps the face as natural-looking as possible while the operation is in progress.”

  That information had been the determining factor to go ahead. He’d never lost consciousness in his life. It had been the one thing about the face change that had bothered him. All the same, not trusting anyone, he’d told Hugo to watch everything from soup to nuts, only warning him not to get rough with the doctor if, as he’d been told might occur, he ended up with black-and-blue eyes for a few days.

  As it happened, he hadn’t, which, having read everything he could on rhinoplasty, was evidently a sign of the surgeon’s ability. No bruises weren’t just an indication of good healing capacity, which he knew he had from the life he’d led; they reflected the surgeon’s skill. Nose bones have a good memory. Th
ose advising him on such matters had chosen well, a surgeon who had handled the delicate nose bones with such finesse, they would never resume their previous position, a surgeon who, because of his own checkered past, would never talk.

  Soon, another heavyweight guard would relieve Hugo for a few hours, but there was no one as dedicated as he was. In his opinion, another of Hugo’s major assets was his keen antipathy to women.

  Lucky Hugo. Although no woman would dare try to fool him, he sometimes wished he could leave them alone, too. Would his new nose and the few other alterations just carried out make him more attractive to women? As if he cared. His old nose had never stood in the way of his conquests. How could it when he was, as Randela had once described it, “literally filthy rich.” The delicious, but far-too-smart-for-her-own-good Brazilian had pointed out one day that truckload after truckload of dirty crumpled dollars, pounds sterling, lire, yen, pesetas, and marks pouring into Colombia from drug deals had given new meaning to the phrase, just as a new one—money laundering—had had to be invented to make use of it.

  If Randela had had the sense to shut up and to stay alive, how surprised she would be to know that it was she who had first given him the idea that, when it became expedient to take on a new identity, he should go to a plastic surgeon.

  He could remember it as if it were yesterday. They’d just made love and he’d noticed something different about her thighs. There was simply less of them, and finally she admitted she’d had some body work done, some thigh trimming, from the most famous slicer in the world at that time, a Doctor Ivo Pitanguy in Rio de Janeiro, so deft with the knife, according to Randela, women flew to him from all over.

  He’d thought it was her national pride speaking, but he’d checked it out and sure enough, Pitanguy was indeed then the top doc in that field.

  Hugo knocked and put his head around the door. “The doc’s here, wants to see you. Okay, boss?”

  The man who didn’t believe in words when actions would do nodded.

  “How are you feeling?” asked the doctor.