Twist of Fate Read online

  Hannah went back to her aunt’s journal. The question of “Dear Roddy” was still unresolved.

  STEVE DECKER found two bottles of Dos Equis beer in Cage’s huge refrigerator and carried them along with a couple of glasses out to the pool. He walked along the edge watching Cage slip silently under the water, swimming toward the far end with his usual powerful strokes. Sunlight danced on the surface of the pool, dazzling the eye and making it difficult to see the man underneath. Decker sat down in a chair under the umbrella and loosened his tie. It was hot out there even though it was six o’clock in the evening. He should be heading for home in a few minutes. His wife would be waiting with dinner.

  “What do you think, Decker?” Gideon hauled himself effortlessly out of the water. “Did you have a chance to do an analysis of the situation?”

  Decker handed his employer a glass of beer. Gideon stopped drying himself and took a long swallow before sinking down into the other chair. “It doesn’t take much analysis, Gideon. Backing out of the Surbrook deal won’t cost us much in the short term. It’s the long term that’s our problem.”

  “You mean because of what it will do to the reputation of Cage & Associates?”

  “Any way you slice it, it’s going to be interpreted as backing down from a fight. Ballantine will just keep coming at us.”

  Gideon nodded absently. He already knew the truth. He took another swallow of beer and leaned back in the chair, gazing morosely at the faceted water in the pool. “Taking Surbrook from him won’t hurt him too badly. He’s still at the stage where his backers expect him to lose a few battles.”

  “You’re not at that stage. People expect you to win every time, Gideon.”

  Gideon rolled the cool bottle between his hands. “Do you think it’s possible to get tired of winning, Steve?”

  “For you? No.”

  “You sound sure of that.”

  “I’ve worked with you for a lot of years, Gideon. I’d hate to see you if you started losing. You’d be enraged with yourself and everyone else around you.”

  Gideon’s mouth crooked wryly. “You don’t think I’m the kind to accept defeat with gracious equanimity?”

  “Frankly, no. What did you find out about Ballantine’s visit to Seattle?”

  “Not much. He saw Hannah while he was there.”

  “She admitted it?” Decker looked slightly astounded.

  Gideon frowned. “She admitted it. Even said he took her out to dinner.”

  “Jesus. He’s trying to get at you through her, Gideon. You know it.”

  “Hannah says she assured him she wasn’t the femme fatale type. Said she had no influence on me and that she wanted to stay out of the war.”

  Decker smiled briefly. “I can see her saying that. Ballantine was probably only casing the situation, looking for anything he could use. When he found out you’d gone on vacation with her he probably thought he had a handle of some kind. I’m sure he told her that you had been playing games with her, using her to make the victory over Accelerated Design a little more interesting.”

  Gideon studied the Dos Equis label. “I guess someone could make a case for that interpretation. On the surface it could look that way.”

  “The real question is whether or not Hannah now sees it that way. What else did she say when you asked her about Ballantine?”

  “Not much. She hung up on me.”

  Decker raised his brows behind his glasses but was wise enough not to comment. “I think maybe I’d better be getting on home.”

  “You didn’t finish your beer.”

  “You drink it.” Decker nodded goodbye and left.

  Gideon finished his own beer and then reached for Decker’s untouched bottle. At the bottom of the second Dos Equis he was finally able to put his finger on what had really bothered him about the way Hannah had hung up on him.

  The message he had been getting from her since they had parted in Florida was that she no longer considered him worth saving. Gideon wasn’t sure he liked being written off by a guidance counselor.

  He got to his feet and padded through the open sliding glass door to the living room. The cheap little map of Santa Inez Island that Hannah had given him lay on an end table. Gideon had decided to send it out to a frame shop and have it put under glass. It would look good in his bedroom. Not exactly a fine example of the cartographer’s art but interesting in its own right. It would serve as a souvenir of the only real vacation he’d had in years.

  IN THE END Hannah had decided on a yellow leotard and turquoise tights rather than black tights. She had spent nearly a hundred dollars on the proper athletic gear before walking through the front door of her brother’s club. Once inside she had been put in the hands of a professional physical therapist who had immediately worked out a paced program for her knee. The therapist had worn black tights and a silver leotard. Hannah wondered if she’d made the wrong choice when she’d opted for yellow and turquoise. The silver was really quite striking. There were so many fine points to learn about trendy, upscale living.

  She hadn’t had time to ponder the question for long, however, as she soon found herself in the center of a huge machine designed to systematically destroy human muscles and ligaments. Within three minutes Hannah’s new leotard was soaked under the arms. The machine methodically and somewhat obscenely spread her legs and left Hannah with the task of trying to draw them back together. She began to wonder if she should have gone back to the clinic instead.

  “Hannah! When did you join the club?” Vicky Armitage’s astonishment was evident in her voice as she came through the door. She was wearing green on green. It went beautifully with her red hair. “I had no idea you were even considering it.”

  “Just a whim,” Hannah assured her, gritting her teeth as she struggled to get her legs back together. “One I’m already regretting. Thought it might be good for the knee. I’ll be lucky if they don’t have to amputate after this machine gets through with me.”

  Vicky settled into another machine nearby and threw herself into a workout that emphasized her smooth, female musculature. “You’ll get used to it after a while. Any more of your aunt’s books arrive?”

  “I got another carton today. There are still a few more enroute.”

  “Have you had a chance to ready any of the more interesting papers?”

  “Just some journals she kept.” Hannah took a deep breath and wondered if she could manage another battle with the machine. It was a temptation to simply let the thing have its way. If it weren’t for the embarrassment of sitting there with her legs spread apart Hannah would have quit fighting.

  “Do the journals cover the early years of her career? I’d like to see some of her notes on some of the more controversial studies. Before she became such a celebrity there was often a lot of disagreement over her findings. Several of her contemporaries argued with her about her linguistic analysis of the language of the Manatash Islanders, for instance. And she made some major errors in her interpretation of the marriage customs of the Topan Islanders.”

  Something clicked. Hannah had just read a section of her aunt’s journal that morning concerning the Topan Islanders. She struggled with the leg machine while she tried to remember exactly what she had read. “She felt that the rituals used by the Topans to prepare the young girls for marriage were designed to give them more power as women and wives.”

  “Nothing of the kind,” Vicky assured her, not even breathing hard as she leaned into her weight machine. “The tattooing was done for purely cosmetic reasons. It had no religious significance.”

  “My aunt says in her journal that she was able to talk to the women alone and they claimed they only allowed the men to think it was done for cosmetic reasons but that every woman in the tribe understood the true meaning of the tattoos. It was a shared female secret.”

  “That’s not how other anthropologists on the scene interpreted it,” Vicky said firmly.

  “The other anthropologists were male,” Hannah inform
ed her, remembering the notes in her aunt’s journal. “The women of the tribe simply told them the same thing they told all males: that the tattooing was a beauty treatment, nothing more.”

  “Hannah, your aunt was a very young woman at the time she was involved in those studies. She probably wanted to make some original observations to get started building her reputation. I expect she had to invent a, shall we say, more interesting point of view in order to get herself into print.”

  Hannah’s ankles came together with a snap. “You’re saying my aunt lied to further her own career?”

  “Calm down. I said nothing of the kind. Elizabeth Nord was perfectly entitled to her opinions. And they did get her published. They also drew a lot of attention to her over the years because they usually conflicted with the opinions of more-established authorities. In the case of the Topans, as in the case of the Amazons of Revelation Island, we’ll never be able to prove anything one way or the other. The last full blooded Topan died years ago.”

  “You professional anthropologists must be getting nervous about the growing lack of undiscovered tribes to study. What will you do for fieldwork when there aren’t any mysterious primitives left? Even baboons and chimpanzees are getting scarce. You might not have them to fall back on in a pinch.”

  Vicky ignored the sarcasm. “We were talking about your aunt. She seemed to enjoy arguing with the authorities in the field, you know. She never displayed any respect for the great thinkers of her time.”

  “Some of those so-called established authorities who disagreed with her analysis weren’t much older than my aunt was at the time. Maybe they took the other point of view just to further their own reputations, or because they thought it would be easier to get published.” Hannah was getting angry and it showed. All of a sudden it was easier to work the leg machine.

  “Hannah, the Topan marriage customs are just a small example of the areas of disagreement. Your aunt’s journals could shed some valuable light on those areas. I’d like to see how she justified her interpretation of the female initiation rites among the Manatash. She claimed that the women originated the ceremony as a way of ensuring fertility and safety in childbirth.”

  “Seems like a couple of reasonable things to try to ensure.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t anything of the kind. It was simply an adaptation of the male rites and as such didn’t carry any great symbolism of its own.”

  Hannah stopped struggling with the machine and immediately found herself sitting with her legs wide apart. “That’s why I don’t think I’ll turn my aunt’s papers over to the academic community.”

  Vicky straightened away from the weight machine and frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that every one of you probably has an axe to grind, and you’ll use my aunt’s papers to prove what you want proven. She deserves an impartial interpretation, and it’s becoming obvious she won’t get that from other anthropologists!”

  “You think you’re capable of writing this impartial interpretation?” Vicky demanded.

  “I’m going to give it a try.” Hannah unchained herself from the machine and tottered to her feet. “I’ll see you later, Vicky. I think I’ve had enough for one day.”

  GIDEON WAS ON the third bottle of Dos Equis when he remembered the other map Hannah had given him, the one that had been done by military intelligence for the landing on Revelation Island. He dug it out of the desk where he’d stashed it and carefully spread it out on the black glass surface.

  He no longer tried to fool himself into thinking that his interest in maps that evening was simple curiosity on his part. The maps were a way of brooding over Hannah, and after three bottles of beer he was enjoying his brooding in a perverse sort of way.

  The heavily creased military map was fragile. He’d have to get it properly preserved or it would soon fall apart on him. Gideon sat studying the sketched-in details of Japanese fortifications and bunkers. It had probably cost a few lives to get those details. Many more lives had been spent during the landing. All for a chunk of South Pacific rock that, before the war, had been home for only a small group of islanders.

  Gideon let his mind play with the dramatic events that had taken place on Revelation Island and then reached for one of the many atlases on a nearby shelf. It would be interesting to see how accurately the terrain pictured on the simple intelligence map compared with a pre-war rendering.

  It took him a while to find a chart that showed Revelation Island as anything more than a pinpoint in the ocean but eventually he came up with a map that depicted Revelation and a few neighboring islands. Military intelligence must have had to rely chiefly on dangerous aerial surveys because there simply hadn’t been many decent survey maps of the area available.

  The terrain corresponded in a rough way with the one small pre-war map Gideon could find. The airstrip that the Japanese had built—one of the major reasons the Marines had been sent to take the island—was missing from the pre-war map, of course. The Japanese had constructed it after they arrived.

  Revelation was a typical South Pacific volcanic formation with a towering peak in the center of the Island. The beaches that must have been used for the American landing assault were wide expanses with little or no natural cover that the Marines could have used. They would have gone ashore under a barrage of fire from the Japanese bunkers situated above in the rocks. A costly assault.

  The map would have been both a talisman and a bane to the captain who carried it. It was a guide through hell and, at best, it would have been excruciatingly inaccurate. One mile on paper might easily have translated into two or three miles on the ground. In a battle where progress was measured in inches and yards, the difference between a one-mile estimate and a three-mile reality would have seemed enormous. The estimate of the number of Japanese bunkers had probably been way off, too. For every one visible from the air, there could have been five or ten hidden in the rocks. Gideon lost himself for a moment in contemplation of the captain’s frustration and dogged determination to do his job. It was all there in the map.

  The map was marked with a small circle on the east side of the island. Gideon hadn’t paid much attention to it when he’d first noticed the mark, but now he speculated on what it might have indicated. There were other notes on the map, but the ink used to make them was of a different color. He had the impression that the mark had been made by a different hand, although he couldn’t be certain. It was something about the shape of the circle. Too precise. Not like the scrawl that characterized the other notations. A careful search through his post-war atlases for maps of Revelation Island didn’t turn up any indication of what the circle might have been intended to mark. It probably meant nothing now.

  A thought crossed Gideon’s mind. What if the mark had been made by Nord, not the captain who had probably led his men to the airstrip using the map?

  Hannah might find this stuff interesting.

  Gideon went to the refrigerator for another Dos Equis while he tried to decide just how interested Hannah might be in his random speculations. It was an excuse to call her and he knew it. It was humbling to realize that he was reduced to using excuses to make a telephone call to a woman with whom he’d shared an affair so brief that it probably came under the heading of “fling.”

  Even as he dialed the phone he knew the real reason he was placing the call. Some part of him wanted to be reassured that she hadn’t given up on him completely. He didn’t like the idea that she no longer considered him worth trying to save from himself.

  He didn’t realize that he was holding his breath while the phone rang until Hannah picked up the receiver.

  “Hannah?”

  “Still checking up on me? Relax. Ballantine is no longer around as far as I know.”

  He heard the bite in her voice and took a grip on his own emotions. “I was just calling to talk about your aunt’s journals and papers. I’ve been studying the map you let me have. The one done by military intelligence before the landing.�
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  “What about it?”

  “Well,” he was floundering already. “There’s a mark on it that I’m sure indicates something reasonably important. And I don’t think it was made by the man who carried it ashore. I have a feeling it might have been made by your aunt after she came into possession of the map. I just thought you might find it interesting.”

  Hannah hesitated on the other end of the line, and when she spoke again her voice was softer, suspiciously neutral. “I’ll keep it in mind while I go through the journals. Perhaps she’ll mention marking the map for some reason.”

  “It’s probably not important now. Probably means nothing.” Already he was running out of words. “How are things going?”

  “Just peachy when I’m not being pumped for information by you or Ballantine. I can tell right off that I’m not cut out to be a corporate spy. How are things going there? Preparing for the big confrontation with Ballantine Investments?”

  “Among other things. Cage & Associates does have other irons in the fire besides the Surbrook deal.”

  “Ah, yes. You’re a professional wheeler and dealer. Well, don’t let me keep you from your appointed rounds. I’m sure planning the attack on Ballantine is a lot more interesting than talking about a bunch of islanders who no longer exist. Thanks for calling, Gideon.”

  She hung up the phone before he could think of anything brilliant to say. She really had written him off, Gideon thought.

  The knowledge no longer depressed him. It enraged him.