The Charmers Read Online Free PDF Page A

drive, through the air into the depths below.
    Somewhere, somehow, out of the corner of my eye before I shut out everything and fled into unconsciousness, I glimpsed the Ducati tearing up that stretch of the corniche road, its faceless leather-clad driver speeding away without so much as a glance our way. The Porsche was gone, the green car was gone, he was gone, and so, I believed were we. I did not feel it would be to a better place. But then, I didn’t have much time to think about anything.

 
    4
    Chad Prescott
    The flight from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle to Nice’s Côte d’Azur was delayed. That was what Chad Prescott was told when he disembarked from his third flight in twenty-four hours, starting out in a small and very ancient Fokker biplane in a jungle airstrip in the Amazon that took him to Manaus, and from there, on a six-seater Lear to São Paulo. Which was where he had started out to begin with, several months ago.
    It seemed longer than that, he thought wearily, taking a seat at the bar in the first-class lounge and downing a beer, his first in a long time. Well, his first cold beer. He’d had others but those he’d drunk in locations where refrigeration was erratic, if not completely unknown. He had the generator in his truck, of course, but that was used for medical situations, its energy not to be wasted on simply chilling a beer.
    He ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich. It came on a soggy roll but still tasted better than anything he recalled eating recently. There had never been much time to think of anything other than the job at hand.
    Chad was what he’d always termed a “medical man.” Born in Chicago, where he later attended med school, to a French mother and a U.D. engineer father, who had died together in a train crash in Europe, he was used to international travel from childhood, to calling the place he happened to be at that moment, “home.” He was a surgeon specializing in facial reconstruction, which is what took him twice a year to South America, Africa, the Congo—you name it—and where he operated on children with cleft palates, or without noses, or whose jaws were malformed. Job satisfaction rated high on his list, especially when he saw the amazed joy on the young patients’ faces when they looked at the results in the mirror. He might not be able to give them beauty, but he gave them normality. It was enough.
    His other job was as a consultant at a top Paris hospital, where he kept an apartment on the Left Bank. In Paris he needed to be near the river Seine, to keep it somehow always in view or at least around the corner, a walk from the Rue Jacob, or Bonaparte, or the Café de Flore. Sometimes he thought he lived on the terrace at the Flore; he couldn’t count the hours he must have spent in those uncomfortable faux-cane chairs, sipping a glass of wine or a coffee, just watching the world go by. The contrast to the jungles of his other life—his real life as he thought of it—was extreme and he relished it.
    Now though, he was heading for the place he loved best of all: his villa in the South of France where he was fortunate enough to own several acres—hectares as they were called—that protected the privacy he needed. Plus, he now owned the villa next door and its land, left to him by his old friend and neighbor, Jolly Matthews, who’d sent him a letter to that effect a couple of months before she died so violently, so tragically. He’d liked the old girl, they’d enjoyed many a pleasant evening together, conversation and the wine flowing, her tales of the past, of the famous musical star, the beauteous Jerusha, and life as it was then, before the crowds and the airports and the hustle and bustle.
    He planned to invite guests to his villa, old friends, not many but enough; bistros would be visited; a swim in the cool blue Mediterranean of an early morning; good hot French coffee; a croissant