by Wilbur Smith
Peter held up both hands in a gesture of surrender.
‘Never again,’ he pleaded. ‘Not another word – agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ She laughed, and then, ‘I’m hungry, and my throat is sore again with all this talking.’
They crossed the island again, with their bare feet baking on the sun-heated sand, and went back on board the Chris-craft.
The chef had stocked the refrigerator with a cornucopia of food, and Peter opened a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne.
‘You’ve got expensive tastes,’ he observed. ‘I don’t know if I can afford to keep you – on my salary.’
‘I’m sure we could arrange a raise from your boss,’ she assured him with the twinkle in her eyes. In tacit agreement they did not mention Caliph again until they had eaten.
‘– There is one other thing you must understand, Peter. I am of Mossad, but I do not control them. They control me. It was the same with Aaron. Both of us were and are very valuable agents, possibly amongst the most valuable of all their networks, but I do not make decisions, nor am I able to have access to all their secrets.
‘Mossad’s single-minded goal is the safety and security of the state of Israel. It has no other reason for existence. I was certain that Aaron had made a full report to Mossad of Caliph’s identity, that he had detailed the proposition that Caliph had proposed – and I suspect that Mossad had ordered Aaron to co-operate with Caliph—’
‘Why?’ Peter demanded sharply.
‘I do not know for certain – but I can think of two reasons. Caliph must have been such a powerful and influential man that his support would have been valuable. Then again I suspect that Caliph had pro-Israeli leanings, or professed to have those leanings. Mossad finds allies where it can, and does not question their morals. I think they ordered Aaron to co-operate with Caliph – but—’
‘But?’ Peter prompted her.
‘But you do not order a man like Aaron to go against his deepest convictions, and under that forbidding exterior Aaron Altmann was a man of great humanity. I think that the reason for his agitation was the conflict of duty and belief that he was forced to endure His instinct warned him to destroy Caliph, and his duty—’
She shrugged, and picked up her fluted champagne glass, twisting it between those long slim fingers and studying the pinpricks of bubbles as they rose slowly through the pale golden wine. When she spoke again she had changed direction disconcertingly.
‘A thousand times I had tried to discover what was so different between you and me than with the other men I have known. Why none of them could move me—and yet with you it was almost instantaneous—’ She looked up at him again as though she was still seeking the reason. ‘– Of course, I knew so much about you. You had the qualities I admire in another human being, so I was disposed favourably – but there are other qualities you cannot detail on a computer printout nor capture in a photograph. There was something about you that made me—’ She made a helpless gesture as she searched for the word. ‘– You made me tingle.’
‘That’s a good word,’ Peter smiled.
‘And I had never tingled before. So I had to be very sure It was a new experience to want a man merely because he is gentle and strong and—’ she chuckled, ‘– just plain sexy You are sexy, you know that, Peter, but also you are something else—’ She broke off ‘No, I am not going to flatter you any more. I do not want you to get swollen ankles—’ mixing the French idiom quaintly with the English, and this time not correcting herself. She went straight on. ‘Caliph must have realized that I had recruited a dangerous ally. He made the attempt to kill you that night on the Rambouillet road—’
‘They were after you,’ Peter cut in.
‘Who, Peter? Who was after me?’
‘The Russians – by that time they knew you were a double agent.’
‘Yes, they knew—’ She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. ‘I had thought about it, of course, and there had been two previous attempts on me, but I do not think the attempt on the Rambouillet road was Russian.’
‘All right, Caliph then, but after you – not me,’ Peter suggested.
‘Perhaps, but again I do not think so. My instinct tells me they had the right target. They were after you.’
‘I would have to agree,’ Peter said. ‘I think I was followed when I left Paris that evening—’ and he told her about the Citroën. ‘– I think they knew that I was alone in the Maserati.’
‘Then we accept it was Caliph,’ she stated flatly.
‘– or Mossad,’ Peter murmured, and her eyes slowly widened, turning a darker thoughtful green as Peter went on.
‘What if Mossad did not want an Atlas man getting close to their star agent, they didn’t want you to have an ally in your hunt for Caliph? What if they just didn’t want me cluttering up the carefully rehearsed scenario?’
‘Peter, it’s very deep water—’
‘– and there are packs of sharks.’
‘Let’s leave that night on the Rambouillet road for the moment,’ she suggested. ‘It merely complicates the story I am trying to tell you.’
‘All right,’ Peter agreed. ‘We can come back to it, if we have to.’
‘The next significant move was the abduction of Melissa-Jane,’ she said, and Peter’s expression changed, becoming flat and stony.
The choice of the victim was genius-inspired,’ she said. ‘But it required no special knowledge of you or your domestic arrangements. There was no secret that you had an only child, and it needed but a casual appraisal of your character to understand how powerful a lever she could be—’ Magda dipped the tip of her finger into the champagne and then sucked it thoughtfully, pursing her lips and frowning slightly.
‘You must understand that by this time I had faced the fact that I was in love with you. The gift was supposed to affirm that—’ She flushed slightly under her honey tan, and it was appealing and child-like. He had never seen her blush before and it twisted something in his chest.
The book,’ he remembered. The Cornwallis Harris first edition.’
‘My first love gift ever. I bought it when I finally admitted it to myself – but I was determined that I would not admit it to you. I am old-fashioned enough to believe the man must speak first.’
‘I did.’
‘God, I’ll never forget it,’ she said fervently, and they both thought of the savage confrontation the previous day which had ended incongruously in a declaration of love.
‘I try to be unconventional,’ he said, and she shook her head smiling.
‘You succeed, mon amour, oh how you succeed.’ Then she sobered again. ‘I was in love with you. Your distress was mine. The child was a lovely girl, she had captivated me when we met – and on top of all that I felt deadly responsible for her plight. I had inveigled you into joining my hunt for Caliph, and because of that you had lost your daughter.’
He bowed his head slightly, remembering how he had believed that she had engineered it. She recognized the gesture.
‘Yes, Peter. For me it was the cruellest stroke. That you should believe it of me. There was nothing that I would not have done to give her back to you – and yet there seemed nothing that I could do. My contacts with French intelligence had nothing for me. They had no inkling of how or where the child was being held – and my control at Mossad was unaccountably evasive. Somehow I had the feeling that Mossad had the key to the kidnapping. If they were not directly involved they knew more than anybody else. I have already explained that I believed Aaron had given them the identity of Caliph. If that was so, then they must know something that could have helped you to recover your child – but from Paris I was powerless to gather that information. I had to go in person to Israel and confront my control there. It was the one chance that I could get them to co-operate. They might believe my value as an agent was worth enough to give me a lead to Melissa-Jane—’
‘You threatened Mossad with resignation?’ Peter asked wonderingly. ‘You would hav
e done that for me?’
‘Oh, Peter, don’t you understand? I loved you – and I had never been in love before. I would have done anything for you.’
‘You make me feel humble,’ he said.
She did not reply, but let the statement stand as though she were savouring it, then she sighed contentedly and went on. ‘I left everything in Paris. I have an established routine for disappearing when it is necessary. Pierre took me to Rome in the Lear; from there I telephoned you but I could not tell you what I was going to do. Then I switched identity and took a commercial flight to Tel Aviv. My task in Israel was difficult, much more difficult than I had bargained for. It was five days before my control would see me. He is an old friend. No! perhaps not a friend, but we have known each other a long time. He is the deputy director of Mossad. That is how highly they value my services, to give me such an important controller, but still it took five days before he would see me, and he was cold. There was no help they could give me, he said. They knew nothing.’ She chuckled. ‘You have never seen me when I want something really badly, Peter. Ha! – What a battle. There is much I knew that would embarrass Mossad with her powerful allies of the West – with France and Great Britain and the U.S.A. – I threatened to hold a Press conference in New York. He became less cold, he told me that the security of the State took precedence over all personal feelings, and I said something very rude about the security of the State, and reminded him of some outstanding business which I would happily leave outstanding. He became warmer – but all this was taking time, days, many days, too many days. I was going crazy. I remembered how they had found Aaron’s body, and I could not sleep at night for worrying about that lovely child. And you, oh Peter, you will never know how I prayed to a god that I was not too sure of. You will never know how I wanted to be with you to comfort you. I wanted so desperately just to hear your voice – but I could not break my cover from Tel Aviv I could not even telephone you, nor send you a letter—’ She broke off. ‘– I hoped you would not believe bad things of me You would not believe that I did not care. That I was not prepared to help you I could only hope that I would be able to bring you some information of value to prove it was not true – but I never dreamed that one day you would believe that it was I who had taken your daughter and tortured her.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said quietly.
‘No, do not say you are sorry. We were both Caliph’s playthings. There is no blame on you.’ She laid her hand upon his arm and smiled at him. ‘It was not you alone who believed bad things. For at last I had prevailed on my Mossad control to give me some little scraps of information. At first he denied completely that they had ever heard of Caliph, but I risked lying to him. I told him that Aaron had told me he had reported the Caliph contact He gave ground. Yes, he admitted. They knew of Caliph, but they did not know who he was. I hammered on, demanding to see my controller each day, driving him as mad as I was – until he threatened to have me deported even. But each time we met I wheedled and bullied a little more from him.
‘At last he admitted, “All right, we know Caliph but he is very dangerous, very powerful—and he will become more powerful – God willing, he will become one of the most powerful men in the world, and he is a friend of Israel. Or rather we believe he is a friend of Israel.”
‘I bullied some more and he told me, “We have put an agent close to Caliph, very close to him, and we cannot jeopardize this agent. He is a valuable agent, very valuable but very vulnerable to Caliph. We cannot take the chance that Caliph could trace information back to him. We have to protect our man.”
‘Now I threatened, and he told me the agent’s code-name to protect both of us should we ever have to make contact. The code-name is “CACTUS FLOWER”.’
‘That was all?’ Peter asked, with evident disappointment.
‘No, my control gave me another name. As a sop – and as a warning. The name they gave me was so close to Caliph as to be virtually the same. Again he warned me that he was giving me the name for my own protection.’
‘What was it?’ Peter demanded eagerly.
‘Your name,’ she said softly. ‘Stride.’
Peter made an irritable gesture of dismissal. ‘My name is nonsensical. Why would I kidnap and mutilate my own daughter – and Cactus Flower. He might as well have said, “Kentucky Fried Chicken”.’
‘Now it’s my turn to say I’m sorry.’
Peter caught himself, realizing suddenly that he had been too quick to dismiss these scraps of information. He stood up and paced the deck of the Chris-craft with choppy, agitated steps, frowning heavily. ‘Cactus Flower,’ he repeated. ‘Have you ever heard it before?’
‘No,’ she shook her head.
‘Since then?’
‘No,’ again.
He searched his memory, trying for a sympathetic echo. There was none.
‘All right.’ He accepted that as having no immediate value. ‘We’ll just remember it for now. Let’s come to my name – Peter Stride. What did you make of that?’
‘It didn’t mean anything then, except as a shock. Strangely enough I did not immediately think of you, but I thought of confusion between the kidnapper and the victim.’
‘Stride?’ he asked. ‘Peter Stride? I don’t understand.’
‘No, well – Melissa-Jane is a Stride also.’
‘Yes, of course. They didn’t give you the name Peter Stride then?’
‘No. Just Stride.’
‘I see.’ Peter stopped in mid-pace as an idea struck him – and stared out thoughtfully to where the ocean met a blue horizon.
‘But they gave me your full name later,’ she interrupted his thoughts.
‘When?’
‘After we received the news that Melissa-Jane had been rescued. Of course, I wanted to return to Paris immediately – to be with you. I was able to get onto a flight from Ben-Gurion Airport six hours after we heard the news. My heart was singing, Peter. Melissa-Jane was safe, and I was in love. I was going to be with you very soon. At the airport, while I was going through the security check before departure, the policewoman took me aside – to the security office. My control was waiting for me there. He had rushed out from Tel Aviv to catch me before I left for home, and he was very worried. They had just received an urgent message from Cactus Flower. General Peter Stride was now definitely Caliph-motivated, and would assassinate me at the first opportunity, he told me. And I laughed at him—but he was deadly serious. “My dear Baroness, Cactus Flower is a first-class man. You must take this warning seriously,” he kept repeating.’
Magda. shrugged. ‘I still did not believe it, Peter. It was impossible. I loved you, and I knew you loved me – although perhaps you had not yet realized that yourself. It was crazy. But on the aircraft I had time to think. My control at Mossad has never been wrong before. Can you imagine my dilemma now – how dearly I wanted to be with you, and yet I was now terrified – not that you would kill me. That did not seem important – but that you would truly turn out to be Caliph. That was what really frightened me. You see, I had never loved a man before. I don’t think I could have stood it.’
She was quiet for a while, remembering the pain and confusion, and then she shook her head so that the thick fall of dark shimmering hair rustled around her shoulders.
‘Once I reached Paris, my first concern was to learn that you and Melissa-Jane were safe at Abbots Yew, and then I could begin to try and find out how much substance there was in Cactus Flower’s warning—but until I could decide on how safe it was I could not take the chance of being alone with you. Every time you attempted to contact me, I had to deny you, and it felt as though some little part of me was dying.’
She reached across and took his hand now, opened the fingers and bowed her head to kiss the palm and then held it to her cheek as she went on.
‘A hundred times I convinced myself that it could not be true, and I was on the point of going to you. Oh, Peter – finally I could take it no longer. I decided to meet you at Orly
that day and find out one way or the other, end the terrible uncertainty. I had the grey wolves with me, as you remember, and they had been warned to expect trouble – I didn’t tell them to watch you,’ she explained quickly, as if trying to dispel any memory of disloyalty, ‘but if you had tried to get at me they would have—’ She broke off, and let his hand fall away from her cheek. ‘The moment you walked into the private lounge at Orly, I saw it was true. I could sense it, there was an aura of death around you. It was the most frightening and devastating moment of my life, you looked like a different man – not the Peter Stride I knew – your whole face seemed to be altered and restructured by hatred and anger. I kissed you goodbye, because I knew we could never meet again.’ Remembering it her face darkened with sadness, as though a cloud shadow had passed over them. ‘I even thought that I had to protect myself by—’ She gagged the words. ‘– You were part of Caliph, you see, and it would have been the wise thing to do. I admit that I thought of it, Peter. Have you killed, before you could kill me – but it was only a thought and it did not go farther than that. Instead I went on with the business of living, work has always been an opiate for me. If I work hard enough I can forget anything – but this time it didn’t turn out that way. I’ve said it before, but it explains so much that I will say it again. I had never been in love before, Peter, and I could not turn it off. It tormented me, and I cherished doubts – about Cactus Flower’s warning and what I had seen so clearly in the lounge at Orly Airport. It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be true—I loved you and you loved me, and you just couldn’t be plotting to kill me. I almost convinced myself of that.’
She laughed curtly, but it had no humour in the sound, only the bitterness of disillusion.
‘I came out here—’ she made a gesture that embraced sea and sky and islands‘– to be away from the temptation of going to you. A sanctuary where I could recover from my wounds and begin to get over you. But it didn’t work, Peter. It was worse here. I had more time to think, to torture myself with wild speculation and grotesque theories. There was only one way. Finally I recognized that. I would bring you out here and give you the chance to kill me.’ She laughed again, and now there was the old husky warmth in it. ‘It was the most crazy thing I have ever done in my life – but thank God, I did it.’