“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah, damn. Nothing much else to say, except I now have one more job.”
“You’re a busy man,” I said.
“Oh, yes, but not as busy as somebody else is going to be,” Peter said darkly. “You see, that Aussie television crew was correct, entirely correct. There are traitors at work among the UN field teams, traitors who made us go in circles, exposed us to being wounded and killed, and prevented us from doing our jobs. Especially my job: to find those diskettes and Grace. And there was a traitor working in our group, Samuel, of that I have no doubt.”
I looked at him, at the cool and composed operative who was working behind the lines in so many ways. I said, “Yeah, you’re right. We were one screwed-up crew.”
Peter nodded. “Yes. We were. When and if Site A is taken care of, as well as everything else, I’m going to focus my attention on finding our group’s traitor. I have suspicions but no evidence, and if it takes years to get the evidence together, then so be it. I won’t let the matter drop.”
I thought about something and said, “You have an idea of who it might be?”
“I do,” he said.
“Care to tell me?”
“Why?”
“Because I might be able to help you,” I said.
Peter seemed to ponder that for a moment. Then he mentioned a name.
I felt a chill on the back of my neck, and my stomach lurched.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I can help you.”
Peter said, “Good.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I’d been back in my room for about a half-hour when there was a knock at the door.
When I opened it, I was nearly bowled over by a blonde-haired woman smelling of fresh soap and wearing a clean white blouse, tan skirt and a tasty lipstick. She pushed me back into the room and slammed the door behind her, saying, “Oh, Samuel, Samuel …”
I was intoxicated by the feel of Miriam in my arms, and also sickened by what was going to happen in the next few minutes. I kissed her back, again and again, and I looked at her bright face, at the tears in her eyes. “Oh, Samuel, I was so scared that you had been shot. I was so frightened that I wouldn’t see you again … Oh, your face, your poor face …” She traced the scabs and scrapes along my skin and I touched her as well.
“You … I thought you had died back there, too,” I stammered out. “I found your nightgown, all torn up and bloody.”
Miriam pushed herself against my chest again and I hugged her. “We barely got out … Oh, God, it was so scary, all that shooting … One of the Land Cruisers got shot up and Sanjay and I, we wanted to get to you, but Charlie and Jean-Paul said no, no, we couldn’t risk it … I’m so sorry we left you behind.”
I stroked her fine blonde hair. “No apologies. None at all. You did what was right, what was the smart thing to do.”
Miriam moved her head so that she could look up at me. “It felt so very wrong, Samuel. And it was even worse when Sanjay thought he saw you. He got out of the Land Cruiser, thought you were running away from the woods … and that was when he got shot … Oh, God, I hope he didn’t suffer, I hope that—”
The door to the bathroom swung open, and there was Peter. Miriam turned her head and said, “I’m sorry, Peter. What are you doing here?”
Peter’s face was once more expressionless. “I’m afraid you’ll probably find out rather quickly.”
Miriam gently pulled herself away from me and said, “Samuel? What’s this?”
I couldn’t think of what I could say and then there was another knock at the door. Peter looked at me and went over to the door. When he opened it a very happy-looking Jean-Paul came in, bearing a dark bottle of cognac and two snifter glasses. He had on gray dress slacks, black polished shoes and a black turtleneck shirt. “Samuel!” he said. “How good, finally, to see you! Ah, it’s been so long, and I’m so happy to see you here, smiling and happy as well.”
He was weaving slightly, as though he had been drinking. He looked around him and said, “My, this is quite the party. Miriam and Peter as well. It is too bad that Charlie and Karen are not here.”
“And Sanjay,” Peter said quietly.
Jean-Paul slowly nodded. “Ah, yes, poor Sanjay. We cannot forget him, eh? His service to us and the UN. What he did and—”
“Actually, Jean-Paul,” Peter said, stepping over to him. “I’d like to talk a bit about what you did.”
“Excuse me?” he asked. “I don’t understand—”
“How much?” I interrupted. Miriam made as if to say something and I talked over her: “How much were you paid? How much?”
Jean-Paul grinned. “How much? You want to know my salary? In Canadian dollars or euros—which are you asking?”
Peter said, “It’s not the currency you’re paid in that we’re concerned with, Jean-Paul. It’s what you were doing in exchange for the payment.”
Although Jean-Paul’s face was still wreathed in smiles, I could tell that there was something going on behind those merry eyes. “I’m sorry, my friends. Perhaps you have started drinking before me, because none of what you are saying is making the slightest sense. I think I will go now and bid you adieu, until tomorrow.”
Then, moving so fast and smoothly that it amazed me, Peter positioned himself in front of the door, muscular arms folded, his biceps pushing out the fabric of his sweater. “I’m afraid you’re here for a while, Jean-Paul. Like I said before, I don’t care what you were paid. I just want to know what you were getting in exchange for betraying your supposed friends.”
Miriam looked at me. “Samuel, what is this?”
“What’s going on is a little follow-up from the work of those poor dead Aussies,” I said. “They were doing a story, and part of the story was whether or not traitors were sprinkled throughout the UN investigative units, sabotaging their work. Units like our team. Right, Jean-Paul?”
He said nothing, still smiling. Miriam said, “Our team? What do you mean?”
Peter said, “What he means, missy, is that any idiot could see that we were compromised. Any fool could see that we were running around in circles, almost getting killed on a couple of occasions. And for what? Some dead cows—no offense, Samuel—and the dead Aussies, who practically fell into our laps. No Site A, not even a lead for Site A. Just us blundering around in the countryside while the clock ticked down for those war criminals at The Hague.”
Among other things, I thought. But I remembered my promise to Peter, to keep things secret.
Jean-Paul said, “It’s late at night. We’re all tired. And you’re not making sense.”
“Oh?” Peter demanded. “Who was the only one talking to regional headquarters? Who was supposedly talking to them and receiving leads about where to go next? Who was that person, Jean-Paul?”
Jean-Paul’s face was starting to redden. “All my work, I did in the open. You all heard me, every one of you.”
Peter shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Correct. And all we heard was you talking. We never did hear what was coming in on the other side of your earpiece—never heard if, in fact, you were really talking to anyone at all. Maybe you were just talking to static. Who knows? All I know is that you were passing along awful directions to us, directions that didn’t help us find anything, except a chance to get killed. Like Sanjay was.”
Jean-Paul shook his head, looked at Miriam and then at me. But not at Peter. “My friends, surely you don’t believe this, do you? There’s no proof, is there?”
“Sorry, Jean-Paul,” I said. I went over to an open duffel bag on my bed and pulled out my little laptop. It had already been powered up and I punched up a file. Then I brought the laptop over to Jean-Paul and said, “See this?”
Miriam moved around so that she could see as well. Jean-Paul didn’t say anything, so it was up to Miriam. “It looks like a message log, or something.”
“Sure does,” I said. “Thing is, every time I sent along an information or pho
to packet to Geneva, there was a receipt mechanism to ensure that it got there and to the right person in time. Every photo packet I sent has a receipt listing, shown here with a time and date stamp. Every single one, except for the last set that was transmitted. The one that was transmitted over your laptop, Jean-Paul. The one showing those militiamen driving up to the farmhouse. I never got a receipt for that from Geneva, confirming that the photos had arrived.”
Now Jean-Paul’s bantering demeanor was gone. “Perhaps you erred, young one. Or perhaps the system didn’t send the receipt to you.”
“Sure,” I said. “Good excuses—and that’s just what they are, Jean-Paul. Excuses. I gave the photo packets and information to you because you said you could send them quicker to Geneva. But they never arrived. I made a phone call a while ago, got the night desk at the information sector. They never arrived, Jean-Paul. You took them and probably dumped them, right? What were you doing? Helping out the locals, making sure that photos of their faces didn’t end up in a UN computer?”
Jean-Paul looked again at me and Miriam, and said, “Then there must have been some sort of technical error, something that—”
“It’s finished, Jean-Paul,” Peter said, taking a step toward him. “The Inspector-General’s been looking into your history all afternoon. You might have forgotten this, old friend, but radio traffic is carefully logged, and they’re going to match their log with my personal diary, and Charlie’s, to establish when you claimed you were talking to sector headquarters and getting instructions about what to do next. Your bank accounts are going to be searched, too, and if you think the UN can’t find any hidden accounts in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands then you’re sadly mistaken. So. Again: answer Samuel’s question. How much?”
Jean-Paul put the glasses and the cognac bottle down on a little night stand by the door. “Look, mes amis, I’m sure there is something we can work out here—”
Then Miriam walked right up to him and slapped him. Jean-Paul was temporarily stunned but his expression grew dark and angry, and he raised his arm to strike back. I was getting ready to jump in on the fray when Peter—still moving as quick as the wind—got Jean-Paul in some sort of complicated head- and arm-lock, opened the door and tossed him out into the hallway. Jean-Paul fell against the nearest wall, banging his head, bounced back, and then started running. I made to go after him but Peter held me back with a strong arm. “Let him go, Samuel. Let him go.”
Miriam was white-lipped. “After all that? After all that, you’re going to let him go?”
Peter closed the door. “Where is he going? Out there, beyond the compound, where the local militia will gun him down before he can confess that he’s one of them? No, don’t you worry. The IG has officers waiting at the stairwells and the elevator banks. In a few minutes he’ll be scooped up and put on the first plane back to Geneva.”
“To face trial?” Miriam asked.
Peter laughed. “Dear girl, you’ve been around this business long enough. You know what’s going to happen. The UN will complain to the French, and the French will complain that they’re being misunderstood, as always. Jean-Paul will be fined, maybe he’ll spend a few weekends in jail back in France, and then he’ll get a nice little job as a magistrate in some sleepy French village. The UN is a noble, peaceful organization. You know that. Which is why you hardly ever read any stories about UN peacekeepers running smuggling rings, skimming off oil-for-food contracts, patronizing teenage prostitutes, or—in this case—selling out their comrades for cash. Oldest story in the book, am I right?”
Miriam looked like she was preparing some sort of retort, and I said, “Yeah, Peter. Oldest story in the book.”
He picked up the bottle of cognac, tossed it over to me, and I caught it with one hand. Remarkable. Peter said, “It’s late at night, there’s a bottle of cognac and two glasses there. I’m going to leave and let the two of you get reunited. Or would you prefer me to join you with a glass from the washroom?”
Miriam smiled and came over to me. I said, “See you later, Peter.”
“Of course you will,” he said.
LATER, LIGHTS OFF and blinds open, we lay in bed, the cognac bottle uncapped, the small glasses at our side. The blankets and sheets were crumpled at the bottom of the bed, and I felt tired and drained and sore and utterly alive. Miriam was cuddled up on my left, her chin pressing into my chest, an occasional finger tracing my lips. She said, “What next for you, Samuel?”
“Short-term, I plan to get some sleep. I hope you can join me.”
I sensed her smile in the near-darkness. “I think you can depend on that. And long-term?”
“Long-term? Well, I think you and I are going to need a new boss … and if that doesn’t work out, a UN lady told me yesterday that I could go home, if I’d like.”
“And would you?”
“Go home? Well, it’s a thought. But only if you come with me.”
Miriam shook her head gently. “I don’t have the leave time coming to me.”
“Then I won’t go.”
She pressed herself against me, the feel of her flesh on mine exhilarating. The first time, back in the tent, had been magical and wonderful in the rawest sense: coupling with urgency, in a tent in the dark, with the chance of death or injury at any moment. But here we’d had time to take it slow, to take it wonderfully from one level to the next, to explore tastes and sensations, to see and touch and whisper, and I had tried to stretch it out as long as I could, before I just gave in and collapsed in Miriam’s arms, drained of energy and effort.
“I am glad,” she said. “I am glad you’re not going, for I want to be with you, Samuel. As long as is possible.”
I squeezed her shoulders. “I hope that is a very long time.”
“Me, too,” Miriam said, her voice somber. “But times will change. People will change. One of these days the armistice will be reestablished and the work will continue. But I have a confession to make to you, about our work.”
“Go on,” I said.
Miriam sighed. “I am getting tired of it, Samuel. Of trying to document what bad things have happened, what kind of death has been dealt out to innocents. I am tired of the dirt and the mud and the stench of death, of seeing bodies broken and swollen and burned.”
“You’ve been at it a long time,” I said.
“Ah, too long,” she said. “And soon, very soon, perhaps, I am going to give it up.”
“Go back to Amsterdam?”
She sighed again, her warm breath feeling good against my chest. “Perhaps, for a bit. But not for long. No, I think it’s time for me to do something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Médecins Sans Frontières,” she said, the French words rolling softly past her lips.
“Doctors Without Borders,” I said. “A good group. Let me guess. Tired of working on the dead?”
Miriam nodded, her chin digging painfully into me now. I ignored the discomfort. “Tired of working for the dead, Samuel. You see, that’s always been a little wordplay for me, in what I do. I speak for the dead. For the dead woman, butchered as she protected her children. For the teenage girls, brutally raped before they were murdered. For the old men and women in the last years of their lives, cut down because of their last name or skin color or because they were hungry and they escaped from a city that was dying. All of these dead people, on almost every continent, Samuel, I have spoken for. And my voice … my voice is getting tired. I can no longer speak for them. I can only speak for myself. And no one else.”
“And Doctors Without Borders … you’ll be working for the living.”
“In a way,” she said, reaching up to tickle my ear. “I’ll be working for the wounded, for the survivors. I will no longer have to speak for them. All I will do is heal them. That is all.”
I swallowed, my mouth still stinging a bit from the bite of the cognac. “When do you hope to start?”
“I’m not sure. A month, perhaps tw
o.”
I moved an arm across her smooth back. “I’m sure they’re eager to take you on.”
“Yes … but my eagerness, well …”
“Go ahead.”
Miriam raised herself and kissed me gently. “If I may be so forward, do you intend to be with UNFORUS forever?”
I kissed her in return, tasting the lipstick and cognac and her own special flavor. “As a matter of fact, Miriam, I’ve been thinking of a change as well. These doctors … do you think they could use someone to take photos, to write the occasional press release?”
In the dim light I could make out her smile. “It would mean a severe pay cut, you understand.”
“So?”
She laughed and rolled over on top of me, and I hugged her close. “Yes, dear one,” she said, kissing me again and again. “I am sure they can use you.”
“Wonderful,” I said, holding her tight, not wanting to let her move, not an inch. “Wonderful.”
THE SOUNDS OF the shower and Miriam singing in her native Dutch woke me up. I was considering getting up to join her when she finished, coming out wrapped in two towels, one around her head, the other around her slick torso. She leaned over and kissed me. “Did I keep you awake last night?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Why would you?”
She laughed. “My younger sisters, they always said I snored so loud that they were afraid the local dike would be breached. The washroom is free, if you wish.”
I got up and headed to the bathroom, and then looked back at her. She was toweling her hair and said, “Is something wrong?”
“No, everything is right. It’s just that …”
“What?”
“Well, you have both towels.”
“Oh, you,” Miriam said, tossing me the towel that she had been using to dry her hair.
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