Saint in Pursuit by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780340518328
Amazon: 0340518324
Publisher: Coronet Books
Published: 1989-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

4

Although the Saint's formidable reputation was strongly in the minds of both Vicky Kinian and Curt Jaeger when their taxi stopped in front of the Portal Hotel, they would probably have experienced something like the supremely invigorating shock of a bucket of ice water on the nape of the neck if they had been aware of his actual physical proximity. Mercifully for their adrenal equilibrium, they were not subjected to this brusque exhilaration; although when they walked into the hotel, Simon was watching from his car only a hundred feet away, and when Curt Jaeger came out alone a few minutes later the Saint was able to take a long unobstructed look at his face before he got into another cab and rode away.

Simon was less impressed by Vicky Kinian's sharp-featured boyfriend than he was by the hotel she had chosen. Apparently the prospect of future riches had completely subverted her ingrained standards, for from a one-horse elevatorless hostelry in an unpretentious quarter of Lisbon she had seen fit to remove herself to one of the finest examples of solid understated elegance in Geneva. The Portal was directly on the lake, and beyond the braid-draped doorman who stood beneath its crested marquee the Saint could watch the course of sails and speedboats across the calm water.

He did not watch for long, however. Once Curt Jaeger had been carried well out of sight by his taxi, and once Vicky Kinian had had ample time to get herself and her luggage to her room, Simon himself let the doorman usher him into the quiet bronze and gold of the lobby. Within three minutes he had signed for a room and seen his bags carried away to it. Without bothering to inspect his new lodgings more thoroughly, he used a lobby telephone to notify the car-hire agency of his whereabouts, and then went back to the Volkswagen he had rented from them, unfolded a newspaper, and prepared to wait as long as necessary for Vicky Kinian to make her next move. He could only hope that whatever she had to do next involved an actual excursion of some kind on her part, and not some such less detectable form of communication as a phone call. He was also gambling on the probability that she would be too anxious to get on with her quest to sit around the hotel for the remaining few hours of summer daylight.

While Simon waited, and while Vicky unpacked and changed her clothes, a new member of the Kinian caravan was going into underhanded action back at the Geneva airport. The Saint had, in fact, seen him not many minutes before, but he had been no more than a rather ugly face among a great many other unimpressive faces in the terminal building. The only thing which might in any way have made him memorable was his nearness to the bald man with the white Vandyke whiskers just before that dawdling character had made his abrupt departure from the

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