Predator. Wilbur Smith

She rolled on to her back with her arms locked about his neck and as she pulled him over on top of her she let her thighs fall apart and reached up for him with her hips, gasping as she felt him slide deeply into her.

      It was far too intense to last long. They mounted together swiftly and irresistibly to the giddy summit of their arousal; then, still joined, they plunged over it into the abyss. They returned slowly from the far-off places where passion had carried them and neither of them could speak until their breathing had calmed. At last she thought that he had fallen asleep in her arms until he spoke softly, in almost a whisper: ‘I didn’t say anything, did I?’

      She was ready with the lie. ‘Nothing coherent. Only some wild gibberish that didn’t make any sense.’ She felt him relax against her and she carried on with the charade: ‘What were you dreaming about, anyway?’

      ‘It was terrifying,’ he replied solemnly, his laughter almost hidden beneath his serious tone. ‘I dreamed that I pulled the hook out of the mouth of a fifty-pound salmon.’

      It was an unspoken understanding between them. They had come to it as the only way they could keep the fragile light of their love for one another burning. Jo Stanley had been with Hector during the hunt for the two men who had murdered his wife. When at last they had succeeded in capturing them in the Arabian castle they had built for themselves in the depths of the jungles of central Africa, Jo had expected that Hector would hand the two killers over to the United States authorities for trial and punishment.

      Jo was a lawyer and she believed implicitly in the rule of law. On the other hand Hector made his own rules. He lived in a world of violence wherein wrongs were avenged with biblical ruthlessness: an eye for an eye and a life for a life.

      Hector had executed the first of the two murderers of his wife without recourse to the law. This was a man named Carl Bannock. Hector had fed him to his own pet crocodiles in the grounds of the Arabian castle where Hector had apprehended him. The great reptiles had torn Bannock’s living body to shreds and devoured it. Fortuitously Jo had not been present to witness the capture and execution of Carl Bannock. So afterwards she had been able to feign ignorance of the deed.

      However, she had been with Hector when he had captured the second killer. This was a thug who used the alias Johnny Congo. He was already under sentence of death by the Texas court, but he had escaped. Jo had intervened fiercely to prevent Hector Cross taking the law into his own hands for a second time. Ultimately she had threatened to end their own relationship if Hector refused to hand Congo over to the law enforcement agencies of the state of Texas.

      Reluctantly Hector had complied with her demands. It had taken several months but in the end the Texan court had confirmed the original sentence of death on Johnny Congo and had also found him guilty of further multiple murders committed since his escape from detention. They had set the date for his execution for 15 November, which was only two weeks ahead.

      Jesus Christ, Johnny, what happened to your face?’

      Shelby Weiss, senior partner of the Houston law firm of Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett – or Hebrew, Wetback and WASP as their less successful rivals liked to call them – was sitting in a small cubicle in Building 12 of the Allen B. Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, Texas, otherwise known as Death Row. The walls to either side of him were painted a faded, tatty lime green, and he was speaking into an old-fashioned black telephone handset, held in his left hand. In front of him he had a yellow legal pad and a line of sharpened pencils. On the other side of the glass in front of Weiss, in a cubicle of exactly similar dimensions but painted white, stood Johnny Congo, his client.

      Congo had just been repatriated to the United States, having been rearrested in the Gulf State of Abu Zara several years after breaking out of the Walls Unit, as the Texas State Penitentiary, Huntsville, was known. He had spent most of that time when he was on the run in Africa, carving out a personal kingdom in the tiny nation of Kazundu on the shores of Lake Tanganyika with his former prison-bitch, turned business associate and life partner, Carl Bannock. That was Weiss’s connection. His firm had represented Bannock in his dealings with the family trust set up by his late adoptive father, Henry Bannock. The work had been entirely legitimate and extremely lucrative, for Carl Bannock and Shelby Weiss alike. Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett also represented Bannock in his role as an exporter of coltan, the ore from which tantalum, a metal more valuable than gold that is an essential element in a huge array of electrical products, was refined. Since the ore originated in the eastern Congo and could thus be considered a conflict mineral, no different from blood diamonds, this aspect of Carl Bannock’s affairs was more morally debatable. But even so, he was still entitled to the best representation money could buy. If Shelby Weiss had reason to suspect that Bannock was living with an escaped felon with whom he engaged in a variety of distasteful and even illegal activities, from drug-taking to sex-trafficking, he had no actual proof of any wrongdoing. Besides, Kazundu had no extradition treaty with the US, so the point was moot.

      But then Johnny Congo had turned up in the Middle East, captured by an ex-British Special Forces officer called Hector Cross, who had been married to Henry Bannock’s widow, Hazel. So that, Weiss figured, made Carl Bannock family, except that there didn’t seem to be much brotherly love in this family. Hazel had been murdered. Cross had blamed Carl Bannock and had set out to get his revenge. Now Bannock had vanished from the face of the earth.

      However, Hector Cross had seized Johnny Congo and handed him over to US Marshals in Abu Zara, which did have an extradition treaty with the United States. So here he was, back on Death Row, and Congo wasn’t a pretty sight. He had obviously been badly beaten.

      Johnny Congo was crammed into his cubicle like a cannonball in a matchbox. He was a huge man, six foot six tall, and built to match. He was wearing a prisoner’s uniform of a white, short-sleeved cotton polo shirt, tucked into elasticized, pyjama-style pants, also white. There were two large black capital letters on his back – ‘DR’ – signifying that he was a Death Row inmate. The uniform was designed to be loose, but on Johnny Congo it was as tight as a sausage skin and the buttons strained to contain the knotted muscles of his chest, shoulders and upper arms, which gave him the look of a Minotaur: the half-man, half-bull monster of Greek mythology. Years of decadence and self-indulgence had made Congo run to fat, but he wore his gut like a weapon, just one more way to barge and bully his way through life. His wrists and ankles were manacled and chained. But the aspects of his appearance that had caught his attorney’s attention were the white splint crudely placed over his splayed and mangled nose; the distended flesh and swollen skin around his battered mouth; and the way his rich, dark West African skin had been given the red and purple sheen of over-ripe plums.

      ‘Guess I must have walked into a door, or had some kind of accident,’ Congo mumbled into his handset.

      ‘Did the Marshals do this to you?’ asked Weiss, trying to sound concerned but barely able to conceal the excitement in his voice. ‘If they did, I can use it in court. I mean, I read the report and it clearly states that you were already in restraints when they took you into custody in Abu Zara. Point is, if you posed no threat to them and couldn’t defend yourself, they had no grounds to use physical force against you. It’s not much, but it’s something. And we need all the help we can get. The execution’s set for November the fifteenth. That’s less than three weeks away.’

      Congo shook his massive, shaven head. ‘Weren’t no Marshal did this to me. It was that white sonofabitch Hector Cross. I said something to him. Guess he took exception to it.’

      ‘What did you say?’

      Congo’s shoulders quivered as he gave a low, rumbling laugh, as menacing as the sound of distant thunder. ‘I told him it was me gave the order to kill, and I quote, “your fucking whore wife”.’

      ‘Oh man …’ Weiss ran the back of his right hand across his forehead, then put the handset back to his mouth. ‘Did anyone else hear you?’

      ‘Oh yeah, everyone else heard me. I shouted it real loud.’

      ‘Dammit, Johnny, you’re not making it any easier for yourself.’

      Congo stepped forward and leaned down, placing his elbows on the shelf in front of him. He stared