The Kiwi Target

satisfactory?”
    It was five minutes to eight when he knocked, very carefully, on the door of the MacTavish cottage.
    The young woman who opened the door was a considerable surprise. She was far more than attractive: she was beautiful. He surveyed her in two seconds and made a firm resolve to get her into bed no matter what it took to bring her around. He had slept with many beautiful women, but this New Zealand girl was extraordinary.”
    “Mr. Kincaid?” she said. “Please come in. Mrs. MacTavish is waiting for you.”
    As she walked ahead of him for only a few steps, he analyzed her figure and gave her top marks. He had been looking forward to sleeping with Susie again, but this new girl completely changed the outlook of the game.
    Anne MacTavish, who was just as he had remembered her and wearing the same clothes, got up to greet him. “Thank you, Jenny,” she said. “Please sit ye down, Mr. Kincaid. Will you have some tea?”
    When the amenities were completed, Kincaid began. “Mrs. MacTavish, as I told your husband, God rest him, I am about to become the president of an American construction company of a quite unusual kind. We are very much concerned with the environment. For more than thirty years everything we have designed and built has been planned to add to, not detract from, the place where it was put up. This is a very strong policy that we have never violated.”
    “That’s very creditable,” his hostess said.
    “Mrs. MacTavish, when it came to my attention that certain foreign interests—I believe they are Chinese—want to build a large tourist hotel on more or less this very spot, I realized at once that it very easily could be a monstrosity that would virtually destroy the unspoiled beauty of this wonderful region.”
    “My husband was very concerned about that.”
    “I certainly admire and respect him for that,” Kincaid continued, “and I’m sure he realized that this piece of property is important to the hotel builders. They could go around it if necessary, but that would leave you in a terrible position—literally surrounded by high rise that would cut off everything but your own lot.”
    “They can nay do that,” Anne MacTavish said. “Our property goes all the way down to the water and a wee bit offshore. The cliff face is no use. It killed my husband, but no one can touch it while it’s ours.”
    Kincaid noted that she spoke of her husband as though he were still living. He would prick that balloon if and when it became necessary.
    “Now I would like to say why I am here,” he went on. He leaned forward and became a sympathetic friend. “I told your husband that I would pay him twenty-five thousand dollars for an option to buy your property if you ever decide to sell.”
    “For a period of five years,” Anne MacTavish added.
    She was being just a little sharper than Kincaid had expected, but he was not worried. If he couldn’t take an elderly woman who had been living for years in semi-isolation, he was not the man he knew himself to be.
    “Mrs. MacTavish, your husband and I reached an agreement in principle. Now that this terrible thing has happened, I want to assure you that I will keep my word. The twenty-five thousand is yours whenever you are ready to receive it.”
    Quietly, keeping in the background, Jenny refilled the teacups. She forced the break in Kincaid’s selling speech to make sure that the elderly woman in her care was not being pressured. Anne MacTavish, however, seemed to be in full command of herself in all respects. “And why is it that you are making this offer, Mr. Kincaid?”
    Kincaid had been expecting that question and was fully prepared to answer it. “I’m going to be very honest with you, Mrs. MacTavish, because that’s the only way I will do business. This is a magnificent part of New Zealand. Someday there will be a hotel here—it’s inevitable. When that time comes, we would like to be the design consultants. I don’t want to see the Hong Kong speculators come in and push up a high-rise monstrosity that will ruin the beauty of the Bay of Islands forever.”
    “Five years is not a long time,” Anne said. “You could lose your money.”
    Kincaid nodded his head. “I know that, but the important thing is to be sure that the Hong Kong people are stopped. They will probably apply every possible kind of pressure, but as soon as they learn that this property is under option, they will have no choice but to withdraw.”
    There