Dazzle - The Complete Unabridged Trilogy

by Judith Gould

  She shuddered to think of the ghostly figure she cut.

  To avert suspicion, two of the other women wore the exact same extreme outfits.

  Daliah noticed that, herself included, there were sixteen in the party. Twelve were bedouins; the other four included herself and the three men who had captured her. They too had changed from Western clothing into bedouin gear. She would have been hard-pressed to recognize them, the change was so drastic.

  The one named Khalid was in charge. It was he who, from his perch high atop one of the six camels, checked and rechecked their course constantly on a small German compass, and it was he, too, who decided when and where they would stop to rest or eat, and for how long. He paced them so that they neither slowed nor rushed, but kept going at a steady speed.

  They had started while it was still cool and pitch dark out, and the sky was blanketed with enormous stars. Khalid had sat her atop one of the camels, her wrists still tied, and had lashed her feet to the saddle. To avoid any danger of the camel breaking away and running off into the night with her, one of his men rode alongside on another camel, holding her camel's ropes.

  She supposed she should have been grateful for not having to walk, but the saddle was uncomfortable, and the constant sideways swaying motions made her feel seasick. Her arms, from the shoulder sockets all the way down to her wrists, ached and cramped without letting up, and her legs, tied immovably to the saddle, soon grew numb and started going to sleep. Before long, her entire body was tingling with numbness. She shut her eyes and let her mind drift, pretending that the swaying motions of the camel were the rocking of a boat. Anything was preferable to facing harsh reality.

  The rest of the group walked ahead or alongside on foot.

  When the sun came up and she couldn't run off into the dark unnoticed, they brought her camel to its knees and untied her legs. Then they pulled her to her feet, and she felt so dizzy and unused to standing that she fell to her knees.

  One of the women instinctively rushed forward to help.

  'La!' Khalid's sharp command stopped her in her tracks.

  'Samahni,' the woman murmured obediently, turning around and going away.

  Khalid pulled Daliah to her feet. 'You will walk,' he told her roughly in English. 'If you try to escape, we will tie you up again. Do you understand?'

  'Yes,' she said shakily, and nodded, wondering if he could hear her through her prison of thick, muffling robes. He must have because he cut through her wrist ropes with a sharp dagger, and her arms were free at long last. But she could not feel her hands. They were totally without sensation. She tried to clasp them together, but she couldn't get her fingers to move. She could barely even curl them. She guessed it would be a while before the blood would circulate properly through her hands.

  In a way, walking felt good. She had been tied up for so long, unable to move, that the exercise slowly restored her circulation and made her feel alive. On the other hand, walking was treacherous. She kept tripping and stumbling. The ground was never flat; it was either uphill or downhill, or slanted sideways. Rocks and pebbles constantly gave way beneath her feet; at other times, she sank up to her ankles in thick sand, which made walking sluggish.

  They kept her separate from the bedouin women, who from time to time turned around and cast her sympathetic glances. Unless it was absolutely necessary, they did not allow her to speak to anyone. When she had to go to the toilet, it was the woman named Fedya who took her aside, dug a hole in the sand, and helped her raise the robes so she could squat. The indignity of it all both shamed and angered her.

  From the position of the sun, Daliah guessed that they were headed southward, but from where they had started, or where they were headed, or where they were now, she had no idea.

  The bare, dry, bleached hills all around glowed with an incandescent haze of dust, and the dun-coloured desert was a belt of sand and rocks. They avoided all roads, tracks, and known paths, and stuck to the wilderness, being careful to skirt any villages or places of habitation. Every now and then, Khalid and one of the bedouins would go on ahead, climb each hill that afforded a view, and scout out what lay ahead. From time to time Daliah turned around in a complete circle, but all she could ever see were the monotonous sun-baked hills, jagged boulders, and barren stretches of sand. All under the towering blue of the sun-scorched sky. There was no way she could begin to guess the location—it could have been the Sinai, the Negev, or any of the surrounding countries. The brown mounds were featureless and entirely unmemorable.

  Before noon, they stopped to rest, and the women prepared a lunch of more bits of unleavened bread, a cup of sour goat's milk, and two more stringy strips of dried lamb. Then they moved on again, but this time she could sense a tension, an obvious wariness. The group's sudden change in behaviour she took to mean that something important was about to happen. She looked up at the sky. From the position of the sun, she guessed it to be about two o'clock. Everyone was quiet, looking around constantly, searching the distant horizon.

  Then the tension was suddenly gone. Khalid even went so far as to change Daliah's headgear to a normal veil, so that her eyes were free. She guessed that they must have sneaked across a border, or come close to civilization, but when she asked, no one would reply to her questions.

  Several hours later they stopped again, this time for tea. Khalid checked the sun, a map, and his compass. Then he dug a shortwave radio out of one of the camel's packs, raised the antenna, and had a short conversation. After that, he checked his compass bearings, consulted his map, and they moved on again. Less than thirty more minutes passed and they suddenly came upon a neglected airstrip, where a yellow twin-engine Beechcraft was waiting.

  Khalid and his two men put her aboard, climbed in, and the pilot, who had been waiting for them, started the engines. Dust, stirred up by the propellers, boiled in a cloud.

  Minutes later they were airborne and heading south. To the west, a sunset begging for a camera heralded the coming of night.

  Najib looked out the big wall of windows in Saeed Almoayyed's third-floor suite. He had seen the bright runway lights outside the palace compound click on. Where there had been darkness an instant before, a dazzling two-strand white pearl necklace now stretched half a mile across the desert.

  He hit the rheostat so that the room was plunged into darkness, slid aside one of the expanses of glass, and waited to catch sight of the plane. If the landing approach was the same as his, the plane would come from somewhere behind the palace and then fly directly overhead at no more than three hundred feet, drifting into view as it made its final descent to the runway beyond.

  He cocked his head as his ears picked up the sound of a distant buzz-saw whine. It grew steadily louder, and then suddenly blinking wing-tip lights swooped overhead in a blur and seemed to slow as they dropped into full view and filled the entire window. He could faintly make out the Beechcraft's underbelly, and then its thin elevator fin topped with a flashing light came into view and the plane drifted over the compound wall, growing smaller and smaller as it descended to a perfect three-point landing. In the distant glare of the runway lights he could just make out the boxy shape of the waiting Daimler.

  He walked away from the window and turned the lights back up. His lips tightened into a mirthless smile.

  So. Time had done its quantum leap and the past had finally merged with the present. The decades had condensed. The time was come. Daliah Boralevi had dropped out of the skies for a date destiny had scheduled long, long ago. At this very moment she was probably leaving the aircraft; it would immediately refuel, and then Abdullah would be gone to Libya.

  Frowning to himself, Najib went over to Saeed Almoayyed's built-in bar and poured himself two generous fingers of bourbon. Raising the glass in a silent salute to Daliah Boralevi, he swallowed it in a single gulp.

  How quickly one's perspective could change, he was thinking. Until this very moment he would have been happy to wash his hands of the entire affair and forget it all
. Now he was suddenly glad that he had come. He understood that his presence here was as predestined as hers. If nothing else, perhaps by seeing this vendetta through he would finally be able to make his own peace with the past and thus be liberated from the shackles that reached across all those years.

  Preparing to meet her, he donned a fresh robe and his formal black-and-gold-banded white headgear. Before going out, he stopped to look at his reflection in the endless wall of mirrors. He nodded to himself in approval, satisfied with the figure he cut. The robes made him look suitably impressive and authoritative, like a true son of the desert.

  He went through the big Nevelson doors and out into the sculpture-lined hall. Without hurrying, he made his way to the mezzanine of the octagonal foyer, and when he reached it, he did not descend either set of sweeping staircases. He would wait up here, and watch her being led in from below.

  Slowly he paced along the waist-high glass railing and polished brass banisters, his robes swishing and rustling about his feet. The palace was so hushed that he had the illusion he was the only living person in it; all he could hear was the splashing of water as it spilled and rippled down the pink marble wall. Vaguely he wondered if, forever after, he would equate the sound of running water with this wasteful palace in the desert.

  He had to wait some fifteen minutes before they came in. One moment there was silence, and the next a sudden flurry of activity as the tall bronze doors below crashed open and Khalid, Hamid, and the German girl roughly pushed a stumbling black bundle in ahead of them.

  'Move!' Monika shouted harshly from below. 'Schnell!' There was the sound of hasty footsteps as she pushed the figure in the black abbeya and veil forward. 'That way!' she ordered sharply, pointing with her rifle. 'Through that door.'

  'Leave her be.' Najib's voice echoed sternly down from above.

  Startled, they all looked up to the mezzanine. The two men obeyed and withdrew immediately, but Monika stood her ground, her left hand clutching tightly to the shapeless black bundle.

  He took his time coming down the sweeping staircase; after all these years of waiting, he saw no need to hurry now. Head raised, he advanced toward the two women.

  He gestured for the German terrorist to move away.

  Monika resolutely stood her ground. She thrust out her chest, drew herself up with importance, and her words were clipped with that peculiar military bark. 'Abdullah gave me clear orders! I am to guard her with my life!'

  'I believe I can handle this myself,' he told her coldly. There was no mistaking the authority in his voice. 'Get out.'

  Monika's face flushed redly. Abruptly she did an about-face and marched to the door.

  The heavy bronze portals banged shut with a hollow echo.

  They were alone.

  The world was reduced to the foyer.

  He turned to Daliah, and the instant he laid eyes on her a sudden tightness seemed to clench inside his gut. Everything he had felt up to now drained swiftly away. The foyer spun dizzily.

  For a long moment he could not trust himself to speak.

  All he could do was stare.

  Chapter 12

  Daliah's eyes. One look into them and he felt himself reeling.

  There have been faces that launched a thousand ships, lips that caused the fall of empires, but for him, all it took was a pair of eyes. The moment he looked into their depths, he knew he'd tasted of forbidden fruit and that nothing else would ever taste quite the same again.

  They were arresting eyes, the kind of twin jewels maharajas and kings throughout the centuries had killed to possess, and were all the more beguiling since they were all of her that he could see.

  For the first time in his life he was utterly mesmerized, as though an enchanted spell had been woven around him. Wispy trills of gooseflesh rippled up and down his body.

  Those eyes.

  They were the eyes of the purest emerald green flecked with darker slivers of rich Siberian malachite and highlights of paler jade, two luminescent matched cabochons. Their shape was slightly almond, rounded near the nose and tilted upwards at the outside ends at an exotic, almost feline slant, and the lashes were black and long, of perfect sable softness, made of black velvet, of spun-sugar dreams.

  He nearly groaned aloud.

  He'd been dealt the queen of hearts. The ace of spades. A royal flush.

  Like two duelling titans they stood squaring off in that cool octagonal foyer, he in whitest white and she in blackest black. Beneath her veil he was positive her chin was jutting with the same indignation he saw in the light-fractured flashes of her eyes.

  An eternity seemed to pass. Then he caught the sudden movement of her abbeya as she drew a deep, startled breath. Her eyelashes fluttered rapidly in a blink of recognition and, unexpectedly, he heard a ripple of taunting laughter rising from beneath the veil.

  It was like a physical assault. He took an anguished step backward; the laughter had reduced his self-possession to nothing, had hurt as intensely as a knife stab straight through the heart. Then the cynical amusement reached her eyes as well and glowed there like yet another harsh slap: potent, painful, utterly humiliating.

  He stared confusedly at her.

  It was then that she spoke.

  'Well, well, well!' Her voice, as taunting as her laugh, was throaty and mature, almost smoky in its alluring richness. 'Who would have thought that the famous Najib al-Ameer had to resort to white slavery to get women!'

  'You recognize me.' He looked slightly startled, and then cursed himself for showing it. Of course she would recognize him! It was a fool thing not to have thought of it before. His face had appeared with more regularity than he liked in newspapers and magazines and on television on five continents.

  'Even in that silly Rudolf Valentino get-up,' she said astringently.

  'You are surprised.'

  'Why shouldn't I be? I didn't expect it to be you I would find at the end of the line.' Her voice took on the ugliness of mimicry. 'Not Najib al-Ameer, the richest man in the world!' She laughed tauntingly again.

  His cheeks trembled from the effort of trying to keep himself under control, but his voice remained steady. 'I am not the richest man in the world,' he said stiffly. 'Nor have I ever claimed to be.'

  She gestured with her arm. 'The richest. The second-richest. The tenth-richest. What does it matter?'

  He did not speak.

  The laughter drained out of her eyes and they narrowed to lynx slits. 'What do you want of me?' The words hissed venomously forth.

  He did not reply.

  'Why have you brought me here?' she demanded again, more sharply this time. 'Answer me, dammit! Are you playing some sort of perverse sexual game?'

  He flinched at the angry words. 'I would watch my tongue if I were you,' he advised with more calm than he felt.

  It was then that he noticed her hands. She was holding them up in front of her, as though unaware that she was gently massaging her wrists. He stifled a wince when he caught sight of the ugly chafed skin and the deeply embedded pattern left from too-tight ropes. Quickly he averted his eyes.

  Nothing was working out right. Nothing. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined he would feel such pangs of guilt and responsibility, such immediate remorse. Whenever he'd imagined this moment, it had seemed so clear-cut, so well-defined and simple. Nothing at all like this, so complicated and confusing, so rife with boiling emotional turmoil.

  It was all turning out wrong.

  Curse the veil and the abbeya! Instead of rendering her sexless, they lent her an exquisite, painful aura of timeless mystery which reached down into his loins, and deeper still, into his very being.

  He was seized with the mad impulse to rip the offending veil away and reduce her to something human that he could hate and lash out at.

  'I am sorry that we are forced to meet under these regrettable circumstances,' he finally said for lack of anything better. 'If there is anything I can do to make this stay—'

  'You bet
your sweet ass you can do something!' she snarled with shrewish magnificence. She waved her arms and flapped her robes in righteous anger. 'You can release me at once and arrange for my transportation out of this godforsaken hellhole, that's what you can do!'

  He shut his eyes and tried to cast her from his mind, his memory. He had made a terrible mistake. He should never have come down here to see her. She was supposed to be everything that he had taught himself to hate, everything he had dedicated his lifetime to destroying. So why shouldn't he have wanted to see her, just once?

  But he hadn't counted on drowning in the spell of her eyes and his own torment. He was not surprised by her anger and her spirit, but he found himself totally thrown by them.

  What a fool he was making of himself!

  He opened his eyes and managed to find his voice. 'I will take you to your room.' He reached out to take her by the arm.

  'Don't touch me!' Angrily she shook him off.

  'Very well. If you prefer the German girl to me . . .'

  If looks could have murdered, he would have been dead. 'I prefer anyone to you, Arab pig!'

  Faster than the speed of light, his hand shot toward her, grabbed hold of the veil, and yanked it savagely from her face. The wild light blazed wilder in her eyes.

  He pulled his lips back across his teeth. 'Jew bitch!'

  She drew up her head, hawked deeply, and spat a globule of saliva into his face.

  He did not bother to wipe the dripping spittle away. For long moments he could only stare.