Power Play

As she caught sight of Pepper the receptionist smiled nervously. All her staff held Pepper faintly in awe. She set very exacting standards, and she was known to be a tireless worker herself. She had had to be. She had built up the agency from nothing, and now it handled some of the world’s top media and sports stars, negotiating for them advertising revenues that bolstered their incomes well into the millionaire bracket.

The girl behind the reception desk was twenty-one years old. She was a pretty blonde with the longest legs Pepper had ever seen. That was why she employed her. Looking at them kept the clients’ minds occupied while they waited to see her.

Beyond the cool grey and black décor of the reception area, with its discreet touches of white and its Bauhaus chairs, was a luxurious interview room. Concealed behind its banks of pared-down designer wall units was the most up-to-date video and sound equipment on sale anywhere. Anyone who wanted to use one of her clients in any sort of televised promotion had to prove to her first that they knew what they were doing.

Pepper skirted the waiting room, knowing that she didn’t have any appointments. Had anyone asked her she could probably have run through her diary for a whole month without missing out a thing; she had a brain that was needle-sharp and far more flexible than the most advanced computer.

Her secretary looked up at her as she walked into her office. Miranda Hayes had been with Minesse Management for five years, and she still knew very little more about her boss than she had done on the first day she started work there.

She caught the scent of the perfume that Pepper had specially blended for her in Paris, and envied the cut of the black suit. The body inside it was almost voluptuously curved, but Miranda suspected that her boss didn’t carry an ounce of surplus flesh.

She wondered if she exercised and if so where. Somehow Pepper Minesse didn’t look the type; Miranda couldn’t in a thousand lifetimes imagine her cool, controlled boss hot and sweaty after a physically demanding workout.

“Any calls?” asked Pepper.

Miranda nodded.

“Jeff Stowell called to remind you about the cocktail reception for Carl Viner at the Grosvenor tonight.”

A briefly upraised eyebrow suggested a certain degree of impatience that the young tennis star’s agent should find it necessary to remind her.

“He said there’s going to be someone there who wants to meet you,” Miranda added.

“Did he say who?”

Miranda shook her head. “Do you want me to get him back?”

“No,” Pepper told her decisively. “If Jeff wants to play cloak-and-dagger games he must play them alone. I’m too busy to join in.”

She opened her office door and walked inside, closing it behind her, leaving only the lingering trace of her perfume.

There was nothing feminine about the room. When she had commissioned the interior designer, she had told him she wanted it to exude a subtle aura of power.

“Power?” He had stared at her, and she had smiled back sweetly. “Yes—you know, the kind of thing that goes with being the person who sits behind that desk.”

“Men don’t respond well to powerful women,” he had told her nervously. Pepper reminded him of a large lazy cat just waiting to pounce, but then he was gay, and sexual women always made him feel nervously defensive.

Pepper hadn’t argued with him. After all, he was right, but there wasn’t a man born with whom she didn’t know how to deal. It was her experience that the more powerful the man, the more vulnerable his ego; learning how to turn that fact to her own advantage had been the very first lesson she had mastered.

Through the closed door she could hear the muffled, staccato sound of her secretary’s typewriter. The sun streaming through the window caught the delicate gold chain on her left wrist. She always wore it, and she looked at it for a moment with a strange smile on her lips before taking it off and using the gold key hanging on it to unlock one of the drawers of her desk.

This drawer contained her most private files. There were only four of them. Four very special files indeed, and they didn’t belong to any of her clients. Those people who thought they knew her would have said it was typical of Pepper that she should carry the key to that drawer with her at all times, wearing it as other women might wear a lover’s gift.

She paused for a moment before taking out the files. She had waited a long time for this moment; waited for it and worked for it, and now at last the final piece of information was in her hands, and from it she would forge the tool with which she would orchestrate her revenge.

Revenge—not a word for the squeamish.

In the writings of every religion known to man were warnings against the usurpation by man of that power belonging to the gods alone. And Pepper knew why. The pursuit of revenge unleashed into the human spirit a dangerous power. For the sake of revenge a human being would endure what would be inconceivable for any other emotion.

There were no names on the front of the files; she didn’t need them. Each one had been built up painstakingly over the years; information garnered in minute amounts until she found what she wanted.

She paused again before she opened the first one, tapping a dark red fingernail on the folder.

She wasn’t a woman who hesitated very often, and people who had heard about her were often surprised to discover how small she was, barely five foot two, with a delicate almost fragile bone structure. They soon learned that her fragility was like that of steel wire, but Pepper hadn’t always been like that. Once she had been vulnerable, and like any vulnerable creature…She moved her head and stared out of the window. Her profile was pure as an Egyptian carving, her skin moulded firmly to the perfection of her bones. Her eyes slanted slightly, giving her face a mysterious allure.

She looked at the files for a long time before putting them back and locking the drawer. A smile curved her mouth. It had been so long, but now the game was about to begin.

Her phone rang and she picked it up.

“It’s Lesley Evans,” Miranda told her.

The young skating star had only recently become one of Pepper’s clients. She was being tipped to win a gold medal at the next Olympics. Pepper had spotted her over twelve months ago, and had instructed her management team to keep her under observation.

It was said in the business that Pepper Minesse had a gift for putting her money on the right horse, and what was more she always backed outsiders, on good odds.

Pepper said nothing. It made good business sense to let the Press build her up into some sort of prophetess even if it wasn’t true. It added to the mystique that surrounded her, and in actual fact her decisions were based on carefully accumulated facts, leavened by a flash or two of the intuition she had learned to trust.

The skater had been approached with a contract to advertise a range of clothes intended for the teenage sports market. The company involved was well known to Pepper. They liked cutting corners and they tied their young stars up with punitive contracts. The mere fact that they hadn’t approached Lesley Evans through her told its own story.

The afternoon brought a rash of further telephone calls. Pepper’s clients were big stars in the sports and media world with even larger egos, and she was prepared to massage them—up to a point.

At five o’clock Miranda knocked on the door and asked if it was all right for her to go.

“Yes, do…I shan’t be here much longer myself. The reception at the Grosvenor starts at seven.”

Pepper waited until a quarter past five before she unlocked the drawer again. This time there was no hesitation as she took out the files and walked into her secretary’s office, sitting down at the electronic machine on her desk. Miranda would have been chagrined to see the speed and accuracy with which she typed. There was no hesitation; Pepper knew exactly what she was doing.

Four files.

Four men.

Four letters that would bring them here, all too anxious to see her.

In some ways it amused her that she retained enough of her mother’s racial heritage to feel this deep, atavistic need for retribution—for justice…Not justice as some people would see it, perhaps, but justice none the less.

The years had developed within her an ability to stand outside herself and observe and analyse.

Four men had taken from her something which she had deeply prized, and now it was only just that those four men should, each of them, lose what they prized most.

Each of the letters was perfectly typed on the thick headed notepaper of the company. Pepper folded them efficiently and put them in the envelopes, using the stamps she had bought especially for this purpose: part of the ritual.

The security guard smiled at her as she walked out into the early summer sunshine. She was his boss and he respected her, but he was still man enough to cast an admiring glance over her indolently curved figure and slim legs as he watched her stepping out into the street.

There was a post box on the corner where she deposited the letters. Her car was parked outside the building, a very dark red Aston Martin Volante with the number plate PSM 1. Pepper unlocked it and swung her body gracefully into the driver’s seat. The upholstery was cream leather, the seat piped in the same dark red as the coachwork. The cream leather hood was electrically operated, and as she started the engine she pressed the button that would lower it.

She drove as she did everything else; with economy and skill. It took her less than half an hour to drive through the traffic to her home in Porchester Mews. A special card was needed to operate the wrought iron gates that guarded the enclosed development. Like her offices, the buildings were Regency. It was one of the most exclusive housing developments in London, a collection of mews houses and apartments constructed round a shared enclosed garden. All the owners and tenants had access to the special sports facilities within the complex. The Olympic-sized swimming pool was one of the most luxurious in London. The gym had all the latest Nautilus equipment, and the squash courts had been designed by the world champion. In addition to her own home Pepper owned an apartment, which she kept for the exclusive use of her clients.

Her house was three storeys high. Downstairs was the drawing room, a dining room and the kitchen. On the first floor were two guest bedrooms with their own bathrooms, and on the top floor were her own private quarters—a huge bedroom, her bathroom, a sitting room, and a dressing room lined on both sides from floor to ceiling with mirrored wardrobes.