Feet shuffled on the carpet and a narrow lane opened in. front of her, giving a clear view of Munger. Many in the room had known of her previous relationship with him. Many had heard her comments after his disappearance. Several had been present at that auction.
Very slowly, with her long, sinuous stride, she moved down the lane towards him. He watched her coming without a trace of expression on his face.
A few yards away she paused, her right hand placed the cigarette holder between her teeth, then continued up to the back of her head. A moment later her hair tumbled down as she pulled out the single retaining pin.
It should have been a melodramatic, even laughable, gesture but from this woman it caused only a general exhalation of breath. She moved forward again through the silence until she stood in front of Munger. She was as tall as he was and for a long time they looked into each other’s eyes before she said in her husky voice: ‘Ça va, Dave?’
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, then cocked her head to one side and, together with all the others in the room, waited for his reaction. For several seconds his eyes examined her, then they narrowed and darkened.
‘Ça va, Janine. You should cut your hair. It only suited you like that when you were young.’
She recoiled as though from a slap. A low murmur rumbled around the room - a sound of collective approval. ‘No one in the bar that night had ever before seen Janine Lesage anything but totally possessed. Many had been the butt of her sharp tongue and cynical wit. Always her beauty and her use of it had protected her from retaliation. So in her humiliation she had no ally and she knew it. She stumbled back as the lane behind her widened. Her face was ugly as it worked in frustration and fury; her eyes were cobra’s eyes as they glared at Munger. But she was a cobra backing away from a mongoose. Finally she twisted on her heel and tried to stalk out with dignity. It was a failure. For once the long sweep of her hair was not a curtain of grace but a focus of her indignity. She had the instinct not to toss it in her usual exit style.
She left a silence as all eyes turned back to the bar, then the same voice once again yelled ‘Hallelujah!’ and the party restarted with the tempo notched still higher.
It was after midnight when Munger finally escaped to the tranquillity of his suite. It was one of the largest in the Hotel and had two bathrooms, which was why Munger had chosen it. Unlike Ed Makin he had no worries about his expense account. Walter had assured him that the funds available were virtually unlimited. He had backed this up by giving him a chamois leather belt to be worn next to his skin. Concealed in it were fifty thousand US dollars in thousand-dollar bills and fifteen pure blue flawless D colour diamonds, each weighing one carat. So the belt had a total value of close on half a million US dollars - not counting the leather.
Even without Walter’s financial support Munger would have had no qualms about paying for the suite. On his way up he had stopped at reception and collected twelve telephone messages. They were from news agencies and magazines in the USA, Europe and Japan and they all begged for an urgent return call. He would get on the phone in the morning and by noon would tie up all the retainers he needed.
On entering the suite he went first to the larger of the two bathrooms. It was to become his darkroom and he nodded in satisfaction as he saw the two narrow tables he had requested, and the extension wires with additional power sockets. Next he went into the bedroom, stripped off his clothes and hung the money belt over a hook on the back of the door. He never considered concealing it for he had long ago decided that the best security for such an item lay in its innocuous appearance.
Before leaving the bedroom he switched on the radio, found some easy music and turned the volume up so that with the doors open he could hear it throughout the suite.
The smaller bathroom, which itself was as large as many hotel rooms, had a shower stall as well as a tub. Ever since spending time in Japan he had developed an aversion to washing himself in a European-type bath. ‘You soak in your own dirt,’ a Japanese friend had pointed out. So he went into the shower stall, soaped himself and, for fifteen minutes, let the stream of hot water wash away the smell, taste and stickiness of the journey and the sojourn in the packed bar. During those minute he planned in his mind the layout of the darkroom. He had brought with him a lot of equipment, some of which was new to him. There had been significant developments in photographic printing since he had last worked. Also he had never devoted very much time to that aspect of photography, being content to let others do it for him. The impact of his snaps had come from the subject matter rather than the techniques of processing. Now it might be different.
He turned off the shower, dried himself, slipped on a white terry towel robe, moved to the sink and vigorously brushed his teeth. At last the acrid taste of the plane journey was gone.
The mirror behind the wash basin had misted up. With a towel he wiped a clear circle and, for about a minute, stood looking at his reflected face. Had Gordon Frazer seen that image he would have noted the change from half an hour earlier. In the bar there had been some animation as Munger had talked and listened and observed. Now the face was merely a collection of features that made no statement. Identified no feeling.
He turned away from his image and walked through into the lounge. Two large, steel cases lay by the door. He bent down and worked the combination locks and lifted the lids. One contained his original camera, a second camera - a Hasselblad, a great variety of lenses, tripods, boxes of film and several small items for the darkroom. In the other case were the bigger pieces of equipment: an enlarger, paper dryer, paper trimmer, developing tanks, an angle-poise lamp and concertina bottles containing chemicals and fixers.
He dragged the cases across the carpet close to the door of the larger bathroom, then transferred and placed the equipment into position. It only took half an hour because the layout was clear in his mind. He checked it all, then returned to the living room. He arranged his Nikon, the tripods and the lenses and boxes of film on the table, leaving the Hasselblad in the case. Then he crossed to another table on which a bar had been set up. He filled a tumbler with ice cubes and poured Stolichnaya vodka over them. His hand reached out for the soda syphon but he checked himself and took a sip of the neat vodka. It was a clean, sharp taste arid the melting ice would soon dilute it. He stood for several minutes, gently swirling the ice in the glass and occasionally raising it to his lips. He could faintly hear the music from the bedroom: The Commodores were singing ‘Three Times a Lady’. His mind switched to Janine Lesage and the incident in the bar. His reaction had been provoked only by the memory of Duff Paget’s last snap. He had not heard of her comments in Hong Kong all those years ago. He knew of them now for Gordon Frazer had told him after her departure. In spite of his anger he decided that his comment had been true. Her metre of hair no longer suited her. It served only to accentuate the bones of her face that, with the passing years, had become sharper, giving her a predatory look. Perhaps others couldn’t see it. Perhaps others saw her beauty as more refined.
His thoughts were interrupted by a high-pitched buzzing. He turned his wrist and glanced down at his new Seiko alarm watch. It showed 12.55 am. He depressed the button to stop the noise, drained the last of the vodka, walked across to the open case and lifted out the Hasselblad. From a side pocket he took a coiled length of very thin wire. At one end was a flashlight plug attachment. The other end had a round rubber sucker. He fitted the flash attachment into the Hasselblad, carried it through to the bedroom, switched off the radio and put the camera on the bed. Then, uncoiling the wire behind him, he crossed to the window and opened it. He was looking south over the city. He lifted the rubber sucker to his mouth, wet it with his tongue, leaned out of the window and stuck it to the outside aluminium frame. He moved back to the bed, sat down, picked up the camera and set the exposure to 1.7. There was a faint click which would have been absent in a normal Hasselblad. He held the camera in his left hand, turned his wrist and looked at his watch ag
ain. He gazed at the dial for forty seconds until the liquid crystals reformed to show 1.00 am then, with his right hand, he worked the film advance lever three times. Two minutes later he repeated the action.
A hundred miles away in a bunker on the Golan Heights a Mossad radio operator lifted his earphones from his head and picked up the telephone which connected him with Mossad headquarters.
Ten minutes later in spite of the hour, a fat and torpid ORANGE ONE was awakened in his villa in Limassol by the buzzing of a bulky green phone on the bedside table. He reached out, switched on a light and pushed himself into a sitting position. He always slept naked and, had there been an observer, his pink, bloated rolls of flesh would have presented a ludicrous sight. With a glance at an ornate gold clock on the wall and a grunt of irritation he picked up the phone. His scowl immediately softened to a smile as he heard the duty officer in ORANGE headquarters inform him that ORANGE BLUE had carried out his first radio check.
Walter cradled the phone, switched off the light, slid down into the bed and tried to recapture his interrupted dream which had involved a mountain of delicious food surrounded by an army of voluptuous women.
At about that time in Beirut Munger was having a nightmare: the same nightmare he had suffered repeatedly for nine years.
It had taken him only a minute to wind up his aerial and put away the camera/radio. The journey, the party and setting up the darkroom had combined to exhaust him physically and within minutes he was asleep. The curtains over the window had not been closed and a nearly full moon cast a soft light into the room. Like Walter, he too slept naked with the sheet to his waist. An observer though would have seen a very different sight. His body was slim and taut and dark from the sun. A wide scar on his left shoulder showed up paler. It was a wound badly stitched after a Vietcong with a Kalashnikov had shown scant respect for famous photographers.
At first he lay on his back, completely still, his head propped high on two pillows. After a few minutes his legs began to twitch and his fingers to clench. He started to breathe heavily and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.
It lasted for only ten seconds and then his eyes opened wide and he moaned deep in his throat and sat up and, with his hands, wiped the sweat from his face and then held them over his eyes while his body shook in spasms and his chest heaved.
Gradually the trembling lessened and his breathing slowed. He dropped his hands and looked at the square of uncurtained window. Now at last his facial features showed something: they projected an emotion of total despair.
It had been four months since he had last suffered that nightmare. During those months he had prayed to any deity that might exist that it would be the last time. As the weeks had passed he had dared to hope that the devil in his subconscious had been exorcised. Now his face reflected the burial of hope.
He rolled off the bed and staggered to the window and opened it. Heat and the faint murmur of city noise wafted into the room. He leaned out and looked down at the street twelve floors below. Only one vehicle was moving - a jeep of the Lebanese Army - patrolling the recently imposed night curfew.
For five terrible seconds Munger contemplated the release of suicide. He was outside himself, looking at his own body spread-eagled and broken on the street below. Then his head jerked up and with a sob he twisted away and went into the bathroom and ran the shower cold and held his head under it.
The nightmares had always been the same. They started with a face: a wide, high-cheekboned, oriental face. The face of a girl. It should have been beautiful and by its form it was. But the eyes gave it the antithesis of beauty - they too by their curve and slant should have been lovely, but their content was the nightmare. A mixture of pain, despair and utter contempt. The pain and despair were self-centred. The contempt was directed at Munger - directed like a searchlight.
Wherever he turned he saw the eyes. He could not blank them out, could not close his own. In the nightmare he would run; try to escape, but they were omnipresent until finally they filled his own sockets, looking in. The pain and despair entered his head - the contempt became a knife in his heart.
He turned off the shower, turbaned his head with a towel and went into the sitting room. He knew that sleep was now impossible. Those eyes were waiting in the shadows of his brain. He filled a glass with ice and Stolichnaya and sat down and turned his mind to reality. For him reality was events: things that had already happened - not things that might be, or might have been. Walter Blum was reality. Munger’s thoughts went back four months to the day he had walked into the office of Walen Trading. It had been the nightmare that prompted it. The nightmare combined with distant memories of a woman with a serene look - a woman who had shifted in and out of his young life, bringing light with her presence and darkness with her absence. It had been crude of Walter Blum to use the memory of his mother, but it was the crudity of a crowbar and it had prised open a chink of emotion. Day by day Munger had fought to close that chink and he might have succeeded if the nightmare had not come and kept him perpetually awake and sapped his mental strength until only the thought of physical activity offered a reprieve.
So he had collected his camera and the moment he picked it up and slipped it onto his hand like a glove he knew that it represented his only chance.
The weeks that followed reinforced that belief. There had hardly been a moment for a morbid thought. Within days he was in a Mossad training establishment on the outskirts of Tel Aviv and for the next ten weeks he was a sponge absorbing new knowledge and techniques. He had been amazed by the changes that had taken place during his years of Isolation. One of the instructors pointed out that they had been the years when space technology had come back to earth from the cosmos. They taught him to use radios that could fit into cameras. Bombs that could be contained in a roll of film; listening devices no bigger than a shirt button. They were clever. They built this technology into equipment that he was familiar with and that he could genuinely claim as his working tools.
Misha Wigoda had instructed him on the latest photographic and printing techniques; shown him the new telephoto lenses that could make a car number plate readable from a mile away. Much of it was still commercially unavailable but the Mossad technicians had packaged it into well-known name brands. So Munger’s Nikon lenses would pass any inspection outside the Nikon factory itself.
During those weeks he had learned the spy’s tradecraft from the profession’s acknowledged masters. In turn he had provided some surprises himself. The unarmed combat instructor had quickly concluded there was little he could teach him. Those skills had not changed in nine years.
Similarly he proved to have an inborn ability to follow a man without-being sensed or detected and conversely to ‘feel’ a tail when he was the subject.
‘David Munger’, the chief instructor stated in his final reports, ‘is perfect mental and physical material for a field agent.’
Walter Blum had read the words over General Hofti’s shoulder and smiled complacently.
Munger’s initial mission was simple and explicit: to re-establish himself as a foremost photographer working in the Middle East arena. He was to reforge old links, establish new ones, and by the success of his work and the spreading of his reputation make smooth his movements throughout the area. Nothing more would be expected of him for at least a year and maybe longer. During that year the Mossad network would be attacking the reactor and the people connected with it in France itself. It was only if and when the reactor was actually shipped to Iraq that Munger would be called into play. By that time he must be able to move in and out of Iraq at will.
The period of training had also imparted a sense of belonging. Munger had never really thought of himself as Jewish. He knew that the Jewish faith was considered to pass through the maternal line, but until her abrupt mental conversion his mother had never practised the faith. He had never studied it or taken part in the rituals or ceremonies. He had never even been inside a synagogue.
During
those months in Israel he had been treated simply as a Jew. The instructors had not been disconcerted by his lack of knowledge of the faith. To them it was immaterial. He was a Jew. The fact was enough. At first he thought they might be working to orders, a kind of subtle brainwashing, but he soon dismissed the idea. They were totally natural, assuming that the work he was training for, the risks he would take, could only be accepted by a Jew. By a man motivated by love for Israel and the Jewish people. So he absorbed their attitudes and their motives and began to think of himself as Jewish. He could never accept the religious mantle but then neither could many in the training camp. He saw only a race of people with whom he could finally identify.
On his last day in Israel he had gone to the grave of his mother. It had been in the early morning and the cemetery was deserted. It was one grave among thousands and there were flowers on it. There were flowers on many of them but that didn’t diffuse the impact - rather strengthened it. He had stood for an hour at the grave as light rain fell. His thoughts had been a turmoil but as he turned away he knew that, like his mother, he had made a commitment.
It was ironic, though, that as he sat in his luxury suite with a cold glass in his hand, the commitment was threatened by a pair of eyes that had no substance but could well destroy his mind.
He knew the dangers. Understood the thickness of the dividing line between sanity and madness. During those five seconds as he had looked down to the street below, that thickness had become a transparent membrane. The thought sent the cold from the glass to his heart.
To divert his mind he stood up and started sorting through the equipment on the nearby table. He checked his camera, then he sorted through the boxes of film, separating them into different speed numbers.
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