Reprisal (25 page)

“Nina.”

This woman did not waste words.

“Your friend downstairs is bringing me some floor plans tomorrow at noon.”

She sipped on a vodka straight. “So you might as well stay here.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“Not at all. My superior told me to make very sure you paid for this room.”

Dartley laughed.

She pouted. “Israel is a poor country. Only Americans can afford to stay in these luxury hotels.”

“And some Arabs.”

Nina was dressed in the same modest pantsuit she had worn in the afternoon. When she saw him watching her, she put down her
drink and eased the tunic off. Then her pants. She seemed to have no shyness in disrobing opposite him. Next she slipped out
of her blouse. All she wore now was bra and
panties and highheels. She pranced up and down, sipping her vodka, eagerly displaying her body before his eyes. Finally, the
bra and panties came off, but she kept the shoes.

She stood still while he ran his hands over her body in soft little caresses and strokes that sent sensual shivers through
her flesh. Dartley lavished attention on her statuesque, naked form with his tongue. The tip of his tongue traced arcs and
patterns across her flawless, smooth skin.

She grew crazy with excitement, clasped his head in both her hands, pressed his face and tongue where she felt most sensitive—then
stood before him with her legs wide apart and let his tongue stroke and slip inside the opening of her inner joy.

He carried her to the bed, pulled off his clothes, and took pleasure in the warm silky feel of her body against his. He stroked
and fondled her until she no longer knew who or where she was, until she felt she was just a mass of melting sensations crying
out to him to ease her heat.

She lay on her back, heaving with passion, legs parted submissively. He drove his member deep within her, withdrew to the
very tip and then thrust its full length forward again into her parting, quivering tissues, enjoying fiercely the duty of
his manhood, filling her needful want with the mastery of his cock.

The two men’s camels followed their Bedouin guide’s camel through the cold desert night. All they could hear were their own
breathing and the sand-muffled thumps of the camels’ feet. Sometimes the Bedouin muttered in Arabic, or one of the two men
he was guiding said something in French—careful of what he said since the Bedouin also spoke that language. From time to time,
vast black masses of rock loomed up close to them out of the darkness, and they veered away from them like small boats at
sea avoiding fog-shrouded cliffs. It was clear to the two men that the Bedouin was using these occasional rock outcrops as
landmarks on their nocturnal voyage, yet how he managed to navigate on the long tracts between the rocks remained a mystery
to them. When one of the two men suggested in French that maybe the camels themselves knew the way, the Bedouin did not laugh.
They were heading due south, and so they saw the dawn begin to break off to their left. The camels
plodded onward at their unvarying pace as bars of gray light appeared gradually.

“This shitty animal is crawling with ticks,” one complained. “I’ve been bitten at least a dozen times.”

The other answered, “I’m so goddam seasick or whatever from sitting up here swaying around all these hours, I probably haven’t
noticed them biting me. Not to mention freezing my ass off. I’ve forgotten why the desert gets so cold at night. You’re the
scientist here. Why does it happen?”

“Why not ask our guide what his explanation is?”

“He’ll probably say Allah did it to keep us infidels in our hotels at night.”

This time the Bedouin did laugh.

The sky lightened by the minute, yet they could see nothing close up to them. The camels seemed to be walking over vast empty
sands. It was another twenty minutes before the pink rays of the as yet unrisen sun poked up from behind hills to the east.
Then they saw the scoured, eaten rock formations, pinkish brown, towering around them on all sides. One remarked that he felt
they and their guide, even though mounted on tall camels, were like three ants on an early morning boulevard. The scale of
the high, bare crags and level, windblown sands made them feel miniaturized. Their guide told them how Lawrence and an Arab
prince had come this way, as they were doing, to descend on Aqaba in secret. The two men deliberately refrained from exchanging
a glance, and the Bedouin smiled at them with glittering eyes and asked no questions. When they neared another of the monolithic
structures he pointed out script carved in the rock thousands of years ago,
script older than Arabic or Hebrew, perhaps telling ancient travelers where to find water. There was water here then, he informed
them. There was none now. The sun had just barely cleared the rocks to the east when the Bedouin signaled his camel to bend
its four legs and drop on its belly to the sand. The two other camels followed suit without their riders’ bidding. The three
men dismounted. The Bedouin pointed south into the reddish-purple mountains and the two men nodded. Each shook hands with
the guide, then heaved a knapsack on his back and began to climb the steep incline. The Bedouin secured their two camels on
a line behind his own, remounted and struck north. Neither he nor they glanced behind them again.

Alain Mendes and Luc Jacob were sweating and exhausted when they tramped down from the mountains into the town of Aqaba. They
consulted a map and found their bearings for the Hotel Jarnac. The French waiter looked at them with an unwelcoming stare
as they trooped dustily into the hotel breakfasting area, but he mellowed when he heard their Parisian accents. It had been
six years since the waiter had been home and he was soon plying the two men with coffee, croissants, and cognac while they
told him the latest from the French capital and gave him a current copy of
Paris-Match
and some newspapers. This early morning chatter about life in Paris soon brought Michelle Perret to their table. As they
talked, she looked the young men over and they both flirted with her. Luc was fair-haired, with blue eyes beneath his tinted
aviator glasses, with sun-reddened skin, tall. Alain was more her type—he was gentler, softer,
with dark brown hair, olive skin, understanding brown eyes, and had less to say than Luc, but she could tell that he was more
intuitively understanding of a woman. They told her they would love to stay at the Hotel Jarnac, but could not afford to do
so.

Michelle could hardly believe it when she heard herself saying, “I know the room prices here are probably higher than you
intended to pay, being students at the Ecole Polytechnique, and I can’t give you a reduced rate. I do have a small servant’s
room empty on the top floor that I could let you have for nothing, but it would only fit one of you. Maybe Luc could stay
there. Alain, I suppose you could sleep on the couch in my room.”

“Great,” Alain said.

She was flattered at his enthusiasm.

“We could stay on for a few days,” Luc suggested.

“Certainly,” she agreed. “It will be wonderful having you both here. You can see how much excitement you’ve caused already
among us poor exiles in our lonely isolation when you arrived here out of the blue with your talk and atmosphere of Paris.”
She sniffed Alain appreciatively. “I can practically smell the Metro off you.”

He grinned. “I haven’t had a shower in a couple of days. I didn’t know I smelled that bad.”

“The Metro smells wonderful,” she protested, “especially after all this horrible fresh sea air. I want to smell Gitanes and
wine and fresh-baked bread! You want to shower now, Alain? Use the one in my room. Luc, you have no shower. You come down
later from your room.” She touched Alain’s forearm. “Shall we go up?”

Michelle sat on the bed and watched Alain through the open door of the bathroom as he squirted shaving cream on his hand from
an aerosol can and looked critically at his grizzled face in the mirror. After he had finished shaving, he took off his clothes
and stepped into the shower stall. He thought she might join him, but she didn’t and he didn’t ask her. Leaving the water
running, he stepped quietly from the stall and peeped into the room through the crack between the door hinges. Michelle was
hurriedly going through the contents of his knapsack. Alain smiled and slipped back in the shower. Finally, he turned off
the water, came unhurriedly out of the stall, didn’t bother to dry himself, only wrapping a towel around his middle. He took
the shaving cream can from the top of the handbasin and carried it into the room.

Michelle was sitting on the side of the bed, as if she had never moved. She looked at the shaving cream can in his right hand.
“Are you kinky?”

He laughed. “You’ve been away from Paris too long. Look, I’ll show you.” He twisted the head of the can and then depressed
the top, holding the nozzle close to her face. Instead of shaving cream, gas escaped. “Breathe deeply,” he urged.

She inhaled the gas. “God, it’s so long since I’ve been high—I never smoke.” She inhaled again. “I like this. What is it?”

“Nitrous oxide. Laughing gas. What the dentist gives you. It’s harmless.”

She said, “I remember once, at a party, in the Marais, we passed around a balloon of this for everyone to sniff, then we all
took our clothes off, but were
too zonked to do anything.” She inhaled again and again. “Oh, I feel dizzy and numb, and my fingers and toes tingle.” She
giggled.

Alain asked her questions and gave her more nitrous oxide to sniff every few minutes to maintain her high. And she was high!
She never noticed he was taking none of the gas himself. He could not have stopped her talking if he had wanted to, which
of course he didn’t. His only difficulties were to keep her mind from wandering away from what he wanted to hear about and
to keep from incidentally inhaling too much of the gas himself. He wanted to hear who had ordered Aaron Gottlieb’s death in
Aqaba, and she wanted to talk about her lack of a full emotional life in this desert resort. She told him how she had not
even known an Israeli agent was involved, how she had assumed along with everyone else that the body was that of a CIA agent,
an American who had come from Cairo. She gave him the names of her French intelligence contacts in Amman, described her doings
as a French agent in London and Madrid, mixing in just about everything she knew about French intelligence, which in his opinion
was not very much. Alain Mendes gave her an extra strong whiff of gas—enough to put her out for a few minutes—and left her
smiling dreamily on the bed. He dressed, took the room key, and climbed the back stairs hurriedly to Luc Jacob’s room.

“I got everything she knows, all on a minor level,” Alain told him. “She didn’t know an Israeli agent was involved. She thought
he was an American. I don’t think we should kill her—she won’t remember what
it is she’s told me and she didn’t deliberately order the death of a Mossad operative.”

Luc shook his head grimly. “Nabel said over the phone that Gottlieb was a friend of his. Nabel used to go to his kibbutz and
plant lettuce with him or something. Nabel said she was to die. You want me—”

Alain said sharply, “Wait a few minutes and then come down.”

He left the tiny room, went down the back stairs and used Michelle’s key to unlock her door. She was sitting up on the bed,
wiping her eyes and shaking her head sleepily. “Oh, there you are.” She was still smiling.

He put her out again with more nitrous oxide. Then he went to the bathroom, dropped the aerosol can in his shaving kit on
the handbasin, and removed from it a hypodermic syringe and an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid. He pulled the plastic protective
cap off the hypodermic needle, pushed the plunger all the way home, and pressed the needle through the rubber top of the bottle.
He inverted the bottle and, keeping the needle tip below the liquid level, pulled the plunger slowly out, filling the syringe
with the clear liquid. He drew out the needle from the rubber cap, replaced the bottle in the kit, walked back to the bed,
and held Michelle’s bare right arm immediately below the elbow with his left hand. The inside of her arm faced him, and he
squeezed with his thumb across it to block the flow and make the blood vessels stand out. He glanced at her face. Her eyes
were half closed and she still had a goofy smile. He picked a long blue vein running just beneath the skin
in the middle of her arm and he eased the needle into it. He released his grip beneath her elbow and pulled back a tiny bit
on the plunger until he saw a spurt of blood enter the clear liquid inside the syringe, showing that the needle was properly
inserted in the vein. He looked once more at her face, then slowly drove the plunger home, saying softly, “It won’t hurt a
bit. It’s Nembutal. I once had to do this with my mother’s dog.”

The smile never left her face.

When a gentle rap sounded on the door and a voice said, “It’s Luc,” he let him in. Alain went to pack his shaving kit in his
knapsack.

Luc closed the door behind him and dropped his own knapsack on the floor. “Ready to go?”

“Sure.”

“You got laid?”

Alain shook his head.

“I thought you might have because of the smile she has on her face. At least you got a shower out of it.” Luc walked over
to Michelle’s body on the bed and raised one of her eyelids with his thumb. The pupil did not contract from the light.

“Are you checking up on me?” Alain asked.

Luc didn’t answer, just let the eyelid drop back in place and gazed coolly at Alain from his own calm blue eyes behind his
tinted spectacles.

They shouldered their knapsacks, went down the back stairs, and out into the town. No one paid attention to the two foreign
hikers crazy enough to walk places in the morning sun. They climbed back into the hills behind the town. At a lonely stretch
of empty desert, they plodded through hot stones and
baked mud to cross over the invisible border into Israel.

In the morning, Richard Dartley hired a felucca on the Nile. He and Nina went out on the water as the sun’s heat grew, after
they had visited a suq in the cooler early morning. Nina was curious about Dartley’s purchase at the suq, but she said nothing.
The boatman was a wiry, shriveled man with leathery skin, and Nina had bargained with him intensely before they got into the
craft, south of the Kasr-el-Nil Bridge on the East Bank. There was a lively river breeze upstream and they sailed with it
past Roda Island, which had at its southern tip the Nilometer, a marked column which was once used to measure the height of
the river at certain times in order to forecast how well crops would do, since all agriculture depended on plentiful Nile
water.