Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (159 page)

You want her.

You need her.

Shut up shut up shut up!
his mind screamed silently.

The tortured hours crawled by interminably. The truth, when he finally gave in to it, seemed to cut off his oxygen, as
though the air had been sucked out of the suite.
You've fallen
for her,
the tiny voice in the back of his head whispered,
and
you might as well come to terms with it.

Violently he shook his head, damning that insistent tiny voice, and thrust the truth away. No, it simply could not be!
Not her, anybody but her. How was it possible? What devious
witchcraft had been played on him? But yes,
oh Allah be mer
ciful
—he was in
love.

He groaned aloud, clapped a hand to his forehead, and reeled drunkenly.
He was in love with his arch-enemy.

He was in love with
her!
Of all the billions of women in the
world, it was Daliah Boralevi—his sworn enemy.

He was in love with a Jew, a love that could never be.

The knowledge hit him like a physical blow; the force of it
jerked his head with such overwhelming physical force that he
flinched. For a moment he paced wildly, first in one direction,
then the other. Finally, he staggered over to the windows and
yanked aside the white silk curtains.

His view faced east, and outside, the first grey of dawn was
just beginning to pale the sky. As he watched, the sun began
to do daily battle with the night. Then, suddenly, as can
happen only in the desert, it slid victoriously up from under the edge of the world and its lemon-yellow explosion blasted
the night to pieces with such intense speed and power that he
had to shield his eyes against it.

And with the coming of light, his anguish melted away and
a kind of wonderment came over his face. As suddenly as that
desert sunrise, it came to him in a flash—
kaboom!
Out of the
clear blue, lightning had struck—unfried his brains and thrown
open the doors. The simplicity of the situation dazzled him.

Screw everything! He was in love, and love made its own
rules, did it not? So she was Jewish. So he was supposed to hate
her and her family. So Abdullah would try to squash him.
So
what?

For it was her that he loved, and if it had initially taken the
seeds of hatred for love to germinate, it only went to show
how powerful love could be. Even more important, if love
could rise out of the embers of bleakness and destruction, then
surely the poets were right and it could conquer all.

Nothing else mattered; he knew that now. What mattered
was Daliah; her and nothing else. Even if it killed him, even
if she would never be able to find it in her heart to forgive him
for her imprisonment, even if she never spoke to him again, he would still show his love for her by extricating her from
Abdullah's clutches.

He would let her go!

His eyes glowed. Everything inside him began to sing. For
the first time in his life he was filled with a surge of pure
undiluted joy. It was so overpowering that he felt as if his feet
had left the ground and he was floating upright in midair.

And to think he had never even known such a feeling could
exist!

Then his burgeoning euphoria began to deflate.

What rot these emotions were! he thought, as gathering
clouds of depression closed in. What use was love? In reality,
he and she were worlds apart. Not only were they not compat
ible religiously and ethnically, but even if those gaps could be
closed, that still left Abdullah to deal with. His half-uncle
would never hear of such a union, let alone allow it to take place. Heads would roll—the heads of Najib al-Ameer and
Daliah Boralevi, specifically.

He could feel the walls moving and closing in.

Abdullah's long-ago threat still echoed loud and clear.
Should he ever be treacherous, not only would he die, but all his generations, past and present and future. He, his aging parents who lived in the outskirts of Beirut, perhaps even
Yasmin, the loveless wife he had once been married to. Every
one, every last man, woman, and child who shared his blood, all nieces and nephews and uncles and aunts—everyone, of
course, but Abdullah himself!

He stared at the blinding sun, and like a thunderclap,
another door was thrown wide open to dazzling light.

A world without the madness of Abdullah, a safer, saner
world where his long-ago rash pledge of allegiance no longer
held
....

The vision flashed and seized hold, and he could feel his
excitement growing.

The storm clouds of depression were fleeing now. He knew
what he had to do, and it was so simple, so elementary. It
wasn't murder: it was a surgical procedure to cut out the dead
liest and most dangerous cancer of them all, and if he had to
be the surgeon, then so be it. The world would be a better
place for it—the nerve centre of a deadly terrorist cell would
be removed once and for all; financial and armament conduits
to terrorists worldwide would be plugged; there would be less
killing, far fewer innocents wounded, fewer bombs and snipers
and hijackings. Peace would be given, if not a real chance,
then at least a better one.

A life free of the dark spectre of his mad half-uncle.

A life with just slightly less hatred and violence.

Above all, a life in which he could live and love as he pleased,
no puppet strings attached, no allegiances to a madman.

He took a deep breath and held it, the awesome scope of
his vision just starting to sink in. The sun no longer seemed to
scorch; it seemed to shine gloriously. For the first time in his
life he had a warm feeling, however slight, that he had touched
upon something good and greater than himself, something
even possibly heroic.

Of course, it would require intricate planning, and he would
have to be twice as cautious and crafty as he normally would be. Fingers trembling with excitement, he punched out a call to Newark, oblivious of the time difference, and caught Cap
tain Childs just after he'd gone to sleep. 'Bring the jet to Riyadh,' Najib ordered, his excitement mounting steadily.

He was pacing again, but his steps had quickened and were
purposeful.

Now that he had at last awakened from blindness to dazzling
vision, his creative thoughts knew no bounds. Ideas, plans,
and plots crowded his mind.

He would need the yacht, because it was equipped with a
helipad, and—more important—a long-range Bell Jet Ranger
helicopter.

He eyed the telephone thoughtfully, and then made another
call, this time to Monte Carlo, where his yacht occupied the prime berth just inside the stony arm of the breakwater.

Now he awakened Captain Delcroix from the middle of
his
sleep.

'Start the engines at daylight,' Najib instructed the groggy man. 'Bring the
Najah
at full steam through the Suez Canal,
and anchor her along the coast of Oman.'

From the coast to this palace was one hundred and eighty
miles by air. Three hundred and sixty miles round trip would
leave just enough range for the helicopter, which had been
specially outfitted with long-range fuel tanks. The helicopter,
he suspected, would come in handy.

But he wouldn't tell Daliah, he thought. Not yet. Not until everything was set to go and there was no turning back.

He flopped down on the sun-washed bed, put his arms under
his head, and shut his eyes. He basked in the warmth and
smiled. He had made up his mind and felt wonderful.

For that matter, he felt better than he remembered ever
feeling.

He was going to help her escape, and would fight to over
come whatever odds stood in their way.

Perhaps by doing this he would prove to her that he truly
loved her. Perhaps this way, too, he would find redemption
for the pain and terror he had caused her.

It was then, at long, long last, with sunlight flooding the
bed, that for the first time in days he drifted off into a deep, nourishing, and completely untortured sleep.

Like the pleasure dome of a latter-day odalisque, the enor
mous bed was piled high with as many books and magazines
as Daliah had been able to find, the lamp on the bedside
cabinet glowed softly, a glass of water and the TV remote
control were within easy reach, and the stereo played soft
string music. 'A Man and a Woman.' 'Lara's Theme.' 'Moon
River.'

Daliah lay there amid it all, the quilted pink silk covers
pulled up to her chin, a black velvet sleep mask covering her
eyes. She was still as a statue, but her breathing was irregular.
She was wide-awake.

She'd tried counting sheep, counting backward from a hun
dred, chanting a silent mantra, and mentally numbing her
body from the toes upward, just the way Toshi Ishagi had
taught her. She'd leafed through the magazines and tried to
start a book. Then she lay back, convinced that if nothing else
worked, at least Mantovani would lullaby her to dreamland.

Well, he hadn't. All she had done for the last two hours was
toss and turn and keep fluffing the down-filled pillows.

She sat up, whipped off the sleep mask, and flung it aside.
She pounded the bed with a fist.

It was just
...
no
...
good. None of the sleep remedies
worked. No matter how she yearned to blank out her mind and
welcome sleep, the maddeningly persistent images of Najib al-
Ameer—of all people—kept jumping into her mind. Najib
al-Ameer, the prick to end all pricks, the schmuck who out-
schmucked all the world's greatest schmucks, the Arab crimi
nal who she
knew
had gotten her into this life-threatening
situation in the first place—
may he be drawn and quartered, and then rot and fry slowly in hell for eternity!
—she'd tried
everything to banish him from her mind. She had even gone so far as to fantasize suitable fates for him—dismemberment
in a horrible accident; crippling spinal-cord injuries; advanced
leprosy; castration, which sounded especially appealing.
When that still didn't put him out of her mind, she tried to kill him mentally, imagining herself as some kind of mad operatic
Medea. In her mind she stabbed him, shot him, clubbed him,
electrocuted him—she tried every method of murder she could
think of, the more macabre the better—including the use of
an electric knife, a steam iron, and a blowtorch. But the vision
of him survived all these mental onslaughts intact, and per
sisted as a healthy whole—which only made her crosser and
crosser.