Reprisal

by Ian Barclay

  Dartley decided to take a look. Without thinking about it too much, he usually went to the help of fellow Americans when they were in trouble abroad.

  Beneath a streetlight, a youth of about twenty in a white djellaba was waving a knife with an angled bend in its long blade at a red-faced, overweight American about sixty. The red-faced man’s wife was of a generous girth also, accentuated by a bright floral pattern on her dress. She was swinging her purse by its straps and seemed anxious to take on the knife-wielding Arab herself.

  In that instant in which a fresh observer takes in all the details of a scene and puts them together in his mind to make sense of them, Dartley guessed that the Arab was furious enough to attack, but was confused—perhaps because the woman had attacked him. This would come as such a surprise to a young traditional Arab male, he might be temporarily at a loss what to do. On the other hand, both Americans seemed drunk and belligerent, the woman saying to her husband, “Don’t give him a dime, Harry.”

  None of the three saw Dartley approach in the dimness outside the streetlamp’s yellow pool of light.

  Harry held out an unopened pack of Marlboros to the Arab, clutching the bottom of the pack with his fingers and pushing it into the Arab’s face so he could see what the peace offering was.

  With a flick of his right hand, the Egyptian sliced the Marlboro pack in two. The razor-sharp blade left the bottom half of the pack still in the American’s hand.

  Dartley was impressed by this bladework, realizing that the Arab could have just as easily run the blade across the American’s throat if he had chosen to do so. This was maybe beginning to dawn on Harry too, and he quieted down real fast. But Emily was having none of it. She took a wild swing with her purse at the Arab’s head.

  “Ungrateful little foreigner!” she yelled. “You ain’t going to get our cash! Harry, you kick that boy’s ass right now, y’hear?”

  Harry was kind of thinking things over. The Arab was looking at the swearing, purse-swinging woman as if she had two heads and a tail.

  “Inta malak?” Dartley asked the Egyptian in a calm voice. What’s wrong with you?

  His answer was to turn his anger from his confusing previous pair of adversaries and focus his rage on this newcomer, an infidel who dared question him in Arabic. He charged Dartley with his knife.

  That was his mistake. He would have been hard to handle if he had weaved and sparred. Dartley had seen more than one martial arts expert go under to a skilled knife fighter. But the Egyptian’s rage clouded his mind and he thrust himself headlong at what he saw as a new and hated American challenge.

  The Arab came at Dartley with the knife held close to his right hip. Dartley checked the arm of his knife hand with a left-handed reverse grip, thumb down. At the same time he delivered a right vertical flatfist to his attacker’s deltoid muscle joint. Still holding onto the Arab’s arm, Dartley brought his right arm across the back of his opponent’s neck, pushed his head down and brought his right knee up into his face.

  He forced the Egyptian’s right arm up behind his back and applied a reverse hammer lock with his left arm. Dartley had to rip the Arab’s little finger from the knife handle to loosen the grip on the weapon.

  Dartley dispatched him with a blow to the base of his skull and let him sag unconscious at his feet.

  “He’ll be all right,” Dartley reassured the Americans. “When he wakes up he’ll have a bit of a headache.”

  Emily squawked. “Son-of-a-bitch is going to have a pain in his gut, too.” She drove the pointed toe of her highheeled shoe into the prone man’s belly. “Damn mugger!”

  “I don’t think he was trying to rob you,” Dartley said, pushing them both firmly before him out of the side street and into the main thoroughfare. “There’s very little street crime here. He was behaving as if you’d insulted him.”

  “He didn’t speak English, we don’t speak his lingo,” Emily reasoned. “How the hell could we insult him?”

  Harry wasn’t saying anything.

  Dartley gave him a hard look.

  “Well, back there a ways I had to take a leak,” Harry offered. “Happened it was against one of their churches.”

  “Who ever heard of anyone getting threatened with a knife for relieving himself against a church?” Emily wanted to know.

  “A foreigner urinating against a mosque is the sort of thing some of the Light of Islam fanatics imagine in their nightmares,” Dartley explained, now walking along between the two of them. “Don’t you know how things are here?”

  Emily said, “I’m a Baptist from Alabama and it still don’t seem reasonable to me.”

  Dartley laughed. “I’d feel sorry for any Arab you caught relieving himself against your Baptist church down in Alabama.”

  Harry guffawed. “She’d cut his pecker off with one swing of that purse of hers.”

  “I’m a lady,” Emily protested, “and I won’t tolerate that dirty talk. Though I could use a drink.”

  Dartley considered that a drink was the last thing either of them needed. Yet they would provide good cover for him at the bar of the Marriott Hotel. He glanced at his watch. Twenty to twelve. He would take a cab.

  “Where are you staying?” Dartley asked.

  “The Sheraton.”

  “That’s not far from the Marriott, which has the best bar of all the hotels. Let’s grab a taxi and I’ll buy you a drink.”

  It was in the taxi that Emily dropped the bombshell.

  “You’re a nice man,” she said to Dartley. He had told her his name was John and she had forgotton it. “You saved our lives from that mugger and we haven’t even said thank you. Where’s your manners, Harry?”

  “Cab and drinks are on me,” Harry said, and punched Dartley in the arm.

  “My invitation,” Dartley claimed.

  Then Emily’s bombshell: “Very well. But you come with us tomorrow night to meet the prez at his palace.”

  “The who?”

  “The president,” she said. “What’s his name, Harry?”

  Harry couldn’t recall. “I seen him on TV back home though, mouthing off like they all do. We’re all sitting out in the garden late this afternoon, having a little drink or two, when the clown and a bunch of juvenile delinquents with automatic rifles nearly run us down with a truck first of all, then rush around with phony grins while they shake our hands, and next thing we know they’re going to send limos for us tomorrow to come to a reception at the presidential palace. He even made a joke about no booze being served there and so to make sure we’ve had a few before we go.”

  “Ahmed Hasan said that?” Dartley asked.

  “Sure,” Harry confirmed. “You ask me, he’s loony as they come.”

  There was no sign in the Marriott Hotel bar of the pretty woman who had met him that afternoon in the cafe. Dartley found himself disappointed. He had assumed, with no good reason he now realized, that she would be the one to meet him.

  He stayed with Emily and Harry at a table for twenty minutes or so, until they got to chatting with other Americans and he was able to slip away to the bar. He would phone them at the Sheraton tomorrow to go with them to see the prez, as they called him. Harry was an auctioneer in Birmingham and had collected pre-Columbian artifacts for years. Now that supply was tightening up and so he was checking out Egypt. They both referred to themselves as amateur archeologists. Dartley privately considered they were being a little kind to themselves. In better times, he might have put Harry together with Omar Zekri. They could have done business with each other.

  A small, seedy looking man who blinked his eyes a lot stood down the bar. Finally he said to Dartley, “Terence Hunter?”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “Yes, you are. If you follow my meaning.”

  Dartley nodded. “I was expecting someone else.”

  “She’s in room 422.”

  “Are you coming too?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then I’ll ask you now. Can you get me a
floor plan of the presidential palace by tomorrow morning?”

  “Will noon be all right?” the man asked, blinking his eyes.

  “Sure. You want to make it here?”

  The little man nodded and faded away into the crowd at the bar.

  The nameless lady from the cafe was in room 422. Dartley, as always, refused a drink.

  “That much I have in common with the mullahs,” he joked.

  She handed him an American passport. Terence Hunter. Schoolteacher, Huntington, Long Island.

  “Hi, I’m Terry,” he said.

  “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.

  Chapter

  11

  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 ha
ve 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.