Free The Scorpio Illusion by Robert Ludlum

waste the time,” insisted Ardisonne.
    “I’ll give you the names of our sources, Tyrell,” said Cooke. “You’ll take St. Barthélémy. Jacques will cover Anguilla.”
    Hawthorne woke up on the narrow bed in the hotel on the island of St. Barts, still angry at Geoffrey Cooke for having sent him into a no-win situation. The native source he had reached through the chief of island security was a known drug informant, a hustler overreaching himself for the prize of three million American dollars. He had seen an elderly German lady, escorted by her adolescent grandson, disembark from the St. Martin hydrofoil. With that flimsy evidence, he had gone for the prize. The grandmother in question, however, proved to be an overly made-up, very Germanic mother who disapproved of her daughter’s plebeian life-style, and had offered to take her grandson on a grand tour of the islands.
    “
Goddamn it
!” exploded Hawthorne, reaching for the telephone to order whatever breakfast the hotel had available.
    Tyrell walked the streets of St. Barts, passing the time until he flagged a taxi to the airport, where a plane would take him back to British Gorda. There was nothing else to do but walk around; he hated being in hotel rooms alone. They were like solitary prison cells, where a person rapidly became angry with his own company.
    And then it happened. Fifty feet away, walking across the street toward the entrance of the Bank of Scotland, was the woman who had saved his sanity, if not his life. She was, if possible, even more beautiful. Her long, dark hair framing the lovely features of her suntanned face,the way she walked, the sure glide of the cosmopolitan Parisienne who was never above being courteous to strangers. It all came back to him, the glorious sight of her almost more than he could bear.
    “
Dominique
!” he shouted, parting the bodies in front of him and racing into the street toward the woman he had not seen for so long,
too
long. She turned on the curb, her face lighting up, her smile filled with joy. He pulled her across the pavement to a storefront, and they embraced, holding one another in quickly remembered warmth and affection. “They told me you went back to Paris!”
    “I did, my darling. I had to get my life together.”
    “Not a word, not a letter, even a call. I went out of my
mind
!”
    “I could never replace Ingrid, I knew that.”
    “Didn’t you know how much I wanted you to try?”
    “We come from different worlds, my dearest. Your life is here; mine is in Europe. I have responsibilities you don’t have, Tye, I tried to tell you that.”
    “I remember only too well. Save the Children, Relief for Somalia—two or three other initials I could never figure out.”
    “I’d been away too long, far longer than I would have been without you. Organizationally, things were a mess, and several interfering government regimes weren’t helping. But now that the Quai d’Orsay is firmly behind us, things are easier.” “How so?”
    “For example, one time last year in Ethiopia …” As she spoke of the triumphs of her several charities—over bureaucratic barriers or far worse—her natural ebullience lent a kind of lovely electricity to everything about her. Her wide, soft eyes were so alive, her face so expressive, revealing that well of infinite hope she drew from and which sustained her. Her capacity for compassion was almost unreal, made infinitely credible by asincerity that bordered on naivete, in itself denied by a soft-spoken intelligence and worldliness.
    “… so you see, we got through with twenty-eight trucks! You can’t imagine what it was like to see the villagers, especially the children whose hunger was in their faces, and the older ones who had nearly given up hope! I don’t think I ever cried with so much happiness.… And now the supplies get through regularly, and we’re branching out everywhere, as long as we keep up the pressure!”
    “Keep up …?”
    “You know, my