The Silver Mistress

From this printing: Sir Gerald Tarrant, Chief of Intelligence, has vanished and everyone is writing him off as dead. Everyone, that is, but Modesty and her lieutenant, Willie Garvin. They´ve discovered something in Macao that tells them Tarrant is alive, but his time is running out!

Sexton … moved at an angle down the slope, the light catching his golden hair and beard. (Modesty) stood with feet apart, her head thrown slightly back. By some trick of the reflected light which shone down from the glittering mass of needles in the dome, her body was turned to silver. Her hair, drawn tightly back, gleamed like a black helm. But for the slow rise and fall of the breasts under her steady breathing, she might have been an heraldic figure; woman rampant, silver, crowned sable.

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For the space of a few heart-beats Tarrant felt the heady splendour of her challenge so strongly that it swamped the dark ugliness he knew must come. Then he saw Sexton moving down upon the silvery figure, sure-stepping, poised, incomparably skilled, unimaginably strong, unique in his mastery; and the blood chilled in Tarrants veins as he remembered that she was no indestructible creature of myth, but a young woman of flesh and bone. Flesh to be torn and bone to be broken by the iron lightning of this mans frightful power. Not even the silver mistress could withstand the golden master.

Peter O´Donnell, The Silver MIstress, 1973