The Devil's Breath (27 page)

Telemann rolled over, grunting, closing his eyes, thinking of Laura again.

‘We wanted babies,’ he whispered numbly. ‘Kids.’

‘
Ja
?’

‘Yeah. We tried and tried.’ He looked up, aware of Inge behind him, propped up on one elbow, listening. ‘What do you think? You think it’s me?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You think there’s something wrong with me? Stuff doesn’t work properly? You know? Bad fucking?’

He rolled over and looked at her, curious at how large her breasts were, larger than he’d imagined, big brown nipples, beautiful skin.

‘You want to do it?’ she said. ‘With me?’

Telemann shook his head, saying nothing, and Inge dipped her head, kissing him lightly on the shoulder. Then she drew
the sheet back, almost a medical gesture, quite clinical, and knelt before him, her hands running the length of her body, down over her belly to the tight blond curls beneath. She splayed her thighs a little, watching herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door, her fingers curling inward, glimpses of nail varnish, her pelvis beginning to move, backwards and forwards. After a while, not smiling, she splayed her thighs wider still, and Telemann saw her lips, swollen and moist.

Inge’s eyes closed. ‘You like watching me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does it make you think of your wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘She does this?’

‘No. Never. Not with me.’

‘With someone else maybe?’ Inge opened her eyes again, looking down at him. Her hands were still now. Telemann shrugged, hopeless, saying nothing, and Inge looked at him for a moment longer before bending to him quickly, kissing him, stirring the merest flicker of movement, trying again, her tongue busier, getting nowhere. Finally, she straddled him. He could feel the warm moistness on his chest, caught her eyes for a moment, and she smiled at him, and fitted herself to his mouth, straddling his face, working herself against his upper lip, coming within seconds with a deep groan.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, touching his face.

‘That’s OK.’

She smiled at him, looking down. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said.

Ten minutes later, newly showered, Inge was back in the bedroom, sitting on a stool beside the dressing-table, one leg propped on her thigh, painting her toe-nails. Telemann watched her from the bed. He could still taste her.

‘You share this place with the other guy?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sleep with him, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘He mind me being here?’

‘No. Why should he?’

Telemann shrugged. ‘Just a question,’ he said.

Blum, the
katsa
, arrived for a late breakfast. He looked exhausted and he hadn’t shaved for at least a day. Another bedroom, thought Telemann glumly. More mirrors.

They sat round a small table. Inge brought fresh coffee and an assortment of ready-baked pastries. Telemann, his back to the window, ignored them. ‘When do I make the call?’ he said for the second time.

Blum glanced up. ‘Ten o’clock,’ he said through a mouthful of Danish. ‘He’s always there at ten o’clock.’

‘You’ve got the number?’

‘Of course.’

‘He never changes it?’

‘All the time.’

Telemann nodded. They’d agreed the details the previous evening, the three of them sitting at a corner table in a restaurant in Pinneberg. Assali lived behind high walls and a dense picket of electronic devices in a quiet suburban street in Bad Godesberg. He employed at least four bodyguards, working twelve-hour shifts around the clock. To the best of Blum’s knowledge, he lived on a diet of videos and take-away meals delivered from a local Korean restaurant. Attempts to get to him through either had so far failed. His one flirtation with real life was an occasional dinner at the Hotel Dreisen, a large establishment on the banks of the Rhine, five blocks from his own street. Evidently he trusted the management there. They reserved a table for him in the main dining-room, and as long as the bodyguards wore jackets and ties, they raised no objections. The clientele, in any case, posed no threat to Assali. Middle-aged, prosperous, overwhelmingly German, they had no quarrel with the Palestinian cause. On the contrary, a number of them appeared to harbour a quiet sympathy with anyone brave or foolish enough to take on the Israelis.

Telemann sipped his coffee. The plan, in essence, was simple. He would phone Assali and offer his credentials. He would then supply a number in Washington the man could contact for the necessary cross-checks. The number was Sullivan’s, his desk down the corridor from the Oval Office. Telemann had been in
touch with him already, calling him at home, asking for nothing more than support. If a guy called Assali phones, he’d said, just vouch for me. Tell him I’m on the team. Tell him I mean what I say. Tell him I have the authority to deliver. Listening, Sullivan had made no comment, but simply grunted his assent, asking Telemann to repeat the name, getting him to spell it. Telemann had done so, knowing that an extension on the White House switchboard was the best possible collateral, the juiciest of lures to coax the Palestinian out of his bunker.

With Sullivan’s endorsement, Assali was sure to meet him. For eighteen months, according to Nathan Blum, the man had been looking for ways of acquiring US citizenship. Every approach, direct or brokered through a third party, had been turned down. Now, for whatever reason, he’d think the tide was at last running in his favour. Telemann, on the phone, would hint as much. But there had to be a meet, face to face, neutral territory. Somewhere local would be ideal. That was where the conversation, this first phone call, would lead. No firm suggestions, nothing specific, just the promise to phone again once the Arab had taken a little time to think about it.

Telemann looked across the table at Blum. Last night, the Israeli had described the hotel in detail: approach roads, escape roads, surrounding houses, the layout of the lobby area, the way the doors worked, the awkward left-hand turn that would take them out of the forecourt and back on to the quiet leafy suburban avenues that led up the hill towards the main north–south autobahn. Listening, Telemann had been impressed. Mossad surveillance, as ever, had been impeccable. Ditto, their operational plan. They’d arrange a modest diversion outside the hotel, enough to detach one or two of the bodyguards. Inside, they’d have four agents in the lobby, both men and women. A couple would be guests. All would be armed. All would speak fluent Arabic. Individually, they’d take care of the bodyguards, discreet use of the automatics, whispered advice to stand absolutely still, do nothing, while Assali was escorted quietly out of the hotel and away.

Telemann, a veteran of half a dozen similar snatches, knew all
too well that the operation was more fragile than it looked, that few plans survived contact with the enemy. But the Israelis were the acknowledged masters in the field, and if Blum was as good as Telemann suspected he might be, then he had every reason to anticipate a quiet day or two with the Arab, enough time – certainly – to test the Wulf story. What remained unresolved, though, was the whereabouts of the safe house, the location they’d use to quarantine Assali before crating him up and flying him back to Tel Aviv. The latter, for Mossad, was the real prize: the chance to interrogate him in depth, to charge him with the bomb attacks on the Israeli buses, and finally to parade him in a public court of law, living proof that the world was too small a place to hide from the long arm of Israeli justice. They’d done it with Eichmann and countless other Nazi war criminals. They were doing it now with their Arab enemies, an older strain of anti-Semitism, no less dangerous, no less virulent.

Telemann stirred another spoonful of sugar into his coffee. He had cards to play, and Blum knew it. Without him, without the phone call, Assali wouldn’t cooperate. Unless it was an American invitation, bona fide, thoroughly checked out, the man would never appear. Not on cue. Not when they were ready and waiting to take him. Likewise, without Blum, Telemann lacked the leverage he needed on Assali. It was a strange collision of interests, a brief marriage of convenience that would serve to answer the needs of both parties.

‘Afterwards,’ Telemann mused. ‘What about afterwards?’

Blum shrugged, a gesture of dismissal, the reaction of a man unused to having his professionalism questioned. ‘We switch cars,’ he said. ‘Twice within a kilometre. The third car takes him to the safe house. He stays there—’ he shrugged again ‘—two days? Three days? How much time do you want?’

Telemann hesitated for a moment. Prominent figures like Assali were never easy to assess. Some broke at once. Others were surprisingly awkward. Either way, sleep was the key. Deprive a man of sleep, keep him awake day and night, disorientate him completely with noise and bright light and random spasms of violence, and sooner or later he’d be yours.
Sleep was the glue that kept most people together. Remove it, and most people fell apart. Telemann looked up. ‘Five days,’ he said. ‘Absolute maximum.’

‘OK.’ Blum nodded. ‘Five days.’

He grinned suddenly and reached for the last of the Danish, a visiting businessman happy with the deal he’d made, and Telemann found himself looking at the girl again, wondering what kind of relationship she’d had with Wulf, and now with Blum, and how she could make any kind of peace with herself afterwards. Aware of Telemann watching her, Inge smiled and then nodded at the telephone. ‘It’s ten o’clock,’ she said quietly. ‘In case you’d forgotten.’

*

Emery sat at the wheel of the hired Ford, inching through the Callahan Tunnel. It was rush-hour at Boston’s Logan Airport, the exit roads jammed solid, both lanes in the tunnel nose-to-tail, the temperature already in the mid-seventies.

He reached for the radio again, punching his way through the local channels. He’d flown up to Massachusetts at dawn, Weill’s parting words still on his mind. ‘Face to face, maybe,’ he’d said. ‘On the phone, no way.’ Emery sat back in the big car and scowled at the memory of the conversation, wondering again whether his journey would be worth it, whether he could afford yet another twenty-four hours out of the office. He’d been back from the West Coast for nearly two days now, yet his desk was still invisible beneath the latest carefully sorted piles of data. Juanita, whose appetite for work he’d thought limitless, was visibly wilting from the strain, and she’d stopped even attempting small-talk. Buttressing calls from Sullivan had exhausted her, and she’d warned Emery that after the quarrel about Zahra, the man’s patience was definitely running out. He’d been on again the previous evening, demanding an update on the statement from the PFLP. George Habash was threatening to carry Saddam’s war to the West. The threat, as Sullivan read it, was quite explicit. The man was promising à la carte terrorism against the coalition partners if they set one foot in Iraq. Nerve gas would doubtless be way up the menu. Didn’t
this fit the picture? Shouldn’t the smart money be on the PFLP? Wasn’t Habash the guy to go for?

Emery, eternally sceptical, hadn’t answered any of Sullivan’s questions, and now he shrugged again, emerging at last from the tunnel, easing the big Ford into the queue for the freeway ramp. Interstate 95 would take him south, beneath the towering cliffs of the downtown area, around the long curve of Boston Harbor, out towards Cape Cod. He’d agreed to meet Weill at a rest area near Plymouth. Weill lived on the Cape. Plymouth was halfway there.

An hour later, Emery found the rest area, an acre or two of cropped grass and wooden picnic tables beside the highway. Of Weill, and the ’86 Corvette he’d described on the phone, there was no sign. Emery parked and got out. The sun was hot in a near cloudless sky, but already, mid-September, there was an edge to the wind blowing in from the north. He could smell the ocean in the wind, cool and salt, and soon, he knew, the summer would be gone. Back home, the marina laying-up berths were already filling up with weekend yachts, an early hibernation, and in a month or two he’d have the vast, empty reaches of Chesapeake Bay to himself. That was the kind of sailing he loved best, solitary, physically testing, the short days blessed by silence, and a cold, hard sunshine, and the ceaseless tug of the open sea.

Emery turned on his heel, hands thrust deep in his pockets, walking back towards the car. Lately, the investigation apart, he knew he’d found a kind of peace. Maybe it had to do with Laura, maybe the relief of telling her, of getting it all out in one rich piece and waking up next day to find the relationship still intact. In retrospect, thinking about it, she’d responded the way he knew she always would. With good humour, and tact, and a sense of quiet amusement. She hadn’t belittled him by making light of it. She hadn’t turned her back on him. She’d simply said she understood. He smiled, remembering the touch of her hand on his arm, anticipating the Bay again, and the huge cloudscapes that curtained the path to winter.

He looked up, hearing the sigh of wheels on the warm
tarmac. A red Corvette stopped beside his own car. He raised a hand, knowing it could only be Weill, seeing the man back-view, thick-set, a heavy square head. The man got out and walked towards him, jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. He looked mid-thirties, a stone or two overweight. He had a full black beard and a pair of rimless glasses. He looked slightly harassed, a man whose schedule refuses to run to time. ‘Hi,’ he said, not bothering with a handshake. ‘I’m Dave Weill.’

They sat at one of the picnic tables. Weill had brought sandwiches, home-made foil-wrapped. Inside thin slices of pumpernickel there was processed cheese and rings of raw onion. He laid the sandwiches carefully on the table between them, indoor hands, telling Emery to help himself. He spoke like a native American, East Coast, the tight nasal Massachusetts vowels. Emery, listening, found it hard to believe he was Israeli.

‘I’m not,’ Weill said, when Emery asked the question, ‘I’m US born and bred. Providence, Rhode Island. I’ve lived here most of my life. Israel’s a recent thing.’

‘How come?’

Weill shrugged, demolishing the first of the sandwiches. ‘You get to do these things. We have a word for it. It’s called
aliyah
. It means homecoming. You make
aliyah
. You go home.’