One Touch of Topaz Read Online Free

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    He turned the corner and stopped inamazement. The expanse before him
was
similar to the huge, high-ceilinged room to which she had compared it—providing that room had been located on another planet. It was a good fifty feet long, forty feet wide, and the stalactites hanging far above him gave the entire area the appearance of an alien landscape. A cave on the moon might have looked like this, he thought. It would possess the same sterile beauty, the same chilling magnificence.
    “The pool over there is fed by a fresh spring that empties into a lake after it leaves the cavern.” Samantha lit a large candle affixed to the stone wall by a crude black iron sconce. “It’s ice-cold but adequate for bathing.”
    The signs of human habitation were sparse, a shortwave radio against the far wall, several khaki canvas backpacks, two battered metal trunks, a tin coffeepot and dishes stacked by a pile of beige army blankets. Small stones encircled the blackened ashes that was all that remained of acampfire, and wood was stacked in readiness beside it. She had lived here for two years, he realized. How would it feel to live in this soulless emptiness for that length of time?
    “And these blankets are clean,” she said earnestly. She took four of the beige blankets from the stack against the wall and hurried back to spread two of them, doubled over, on the hard stone floor before the ashes of the campfire. She then spread the other two blankets on the other side of the circle of stones against the cavern wall. “There. At least that’s better than the ground. Are you hungry?”
    “I could eat.”
    “We have bread and cheese.” She hurried to one of the canvas bags and extracted a quarter of a loaf of bread and a bit of Swiss cheese wrapped in foil. She placed them both on the blanket and then straightened. “You can start on that. There are plenty of rations in another room of the cavern. I’ll go get them.”
    “That’s not necessary.”
    “It’s no trouble.” She flashed him another smile as she picked up the lantern. “Eat. I’ll be back soon.”
    She walked quickly out of the room in the direction from which they had come, and he heard her footsteps echo and then fade away.
    Loneliness. Fletch was suddenly conscious of a terrible aloneness as he stood there in the immensity of stone and space. Aloneness, silence, and an awareness of his own vitality, the blood running through his veins, his humanity in a place that seemed inhuman. Lord, he was growing imaginative, he thought in disgust. This was just a cave, Samantha Barton was merely a woman, and day after next he’d be done with both of them and back to his own life.
    He crossed the room and dropped down on the blankets Samantha had spread for him. He had missed dinner, and his stomach was now reminding him of that omission. He reached for the bread and cheese and began to eat.
    ________
    She had to face it, there was a possibility she would die before she managed to leave the island.
    Samantha breathed in the warm night air, trying to fight down the fear that persisted in rising within her. She couldn’t hide forever from the knowledge just because it made her sick with fear. She had been frightened before but never like this. Then it had been a shared fear with Ricardo and the others, an emotion she could deal with if she found something to laugh about or had someone to reach out and touch when the panic came. Now she was alone, and no one knew better than she how dangerous the next few months would be. Her chances of surviving were pitifully slim.
    Unless she got on that helicopter the following night.
    Why not? She wanted to
live
, dammit. It was like a wild hunger in her. There were so many things she wanted to do and see andfeel. She had done nothing but run and hide for as long as she could remember. Didn’t she deserve something?
    But Paco deserved to live, too, and she couldn’t desert him and go her way. Their friendship had been forged in