Heartbreaker: Love, secrets and terror

by Nick Louth

  ‘You’re full of surprises,’ Wyrecliffe said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Okay, we knew that you were smart. Six languages, a degree in politics from the Sorbonne and still only twenty-two. And being westernised, the smoking, drinking and freely displayed hair aren’t much of a surprise. But how do you manage when you go back to Saudi?’

  ‘The modern Arab woman has to be a chameleon,’she said. ‘I’ll fit in any background I need to. I wear a niqab when I’m in Medina, a conservative trouser suit when interviewing a banker in Dubai, a bikini on the beach in Miami and nothing at all for a Playboy photoshoot.’ She giggled wildly.

  ‘Playboy!’ Wyrecliffe laughed. The provocative images flitted in his mind, as they were meant to. They were quiet for a while and then she said: ‘You know, every time the plane lands at Riyadh I feel like I’m entering a medieval prison. I spent half my life abroad, and going back is like entering a great darkness. My mother was born in Beirut, and is half French and half Druze, so my father quite understands why I can’t bear to go back to Saudi too often.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Have you ever been on the Riyadh butterfly route?’ she asked. Getting only a quizzical response she continued. ‘It’s the British Airways flights to London, but you could equally see it on Air France to Paris or American Airlines to New York. You’ll see dozens of Saudi women board the plane at King Khaled terminal one, swathed head-to-toe in black, the full niqab, nothing visible but eyes. The moment the seatbelt sign goes off they’ll troop off to the bathrooms and change.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen it,’ Wyrecliffe responded. ‘The tight jeans and strappy tops. The queue for the toilet on those flights is legendary.’

  ‘It’s not just a change of clothes, but lipstick, jewellery, high heels, perfume, and a lot of hair brushing,’ she laughed. ‘But what you may not know is that these women, the western educated daughters of the wealthy, were already dressed underneath in the sexiest underwear. The well-to-do Saudi housewife probably possesses more silk, more stockings and camisoles, that kind of thing, than her Parisian counterpart. Believe me, Arab erotic creativity flourishes in privacy, and is all the more alluring for being hidden from view.’

  ‘You should do a feature about it,’ he said. One final check on his pager. Jim had closed up the bureau for the night. Now he could relax his journalistic guard. He could drink more, an attractive option. He was within walking distance of his flat and leave the car to pick up the next morning. However, he had other plans, in which Taseena figured prominently. ‘Can I give you a lift home?’

  ‘That’s kind, but I can get a taxi. You don’t want to have to cross the Green Line twice unnecessarily, do you?’

  ‘I’m happy to do it.’

  She relented. In the three blocks between Kuf and the Green Line the character of the city changed completely. The crossing was delineated by pock-marked apartment blocks. Their formerly swish curve-fronted balconies were blasted apart, the sandy-coloured stone riddled with bullet holes, RPG blast marks and smoke stains. The green in the name came from the weeds that grew amongst the rubble, but most of the year it was more like brown. The border between irreconcilable enemies, bearing witness to a generation of hate and mistrust.

  Wyrecliffe queued for the barrier which marked the edge of Muslim West Beirut. A group of armed and bearded men were sitting on crates in the back of an adjacent pick-up playing dominoes. A quick glance from one, and the car was quickly waved through, and there was no one visible at the Maronite side. Wyrecliffe powered the small car up on the looping roads which climbed up to Ashrafiyeh. It was almost midnight as they approached the luxury apartment block where Taseena lived. She turned to him and said. ‘My father’s got in from Riyadh tonight. Come up and meet him.’

  ‘It’s a bit late.’ Wyrecliffe tried to hide his disappointment. Something inside him had somehow imagined a kiss, maybe more, in her apartment. He told himself not to be a fool. This whole wild goose chase, for a woman far out of his league, and a dozen years younger was just getting ridiculous.

  ‘He never goes to bed until two or three. He’ll be pleased to meet you.’ Taseena waved to the security man at the entrance to the luxuriant palm-filled gardens in which the apartment block stood. The guard pressed a remote control, and a sliding shutter to the basement garages opened. There were two lanes, a left lane falling steeply, and a right lane which climbed. She pointed out the right lane. It led to a mezzanine area above the rest of the garage, on which there were four parking spaces, all occupied by luxury vehicles. At the end a gate was sliding up to reveal a large personal garage, with a door at the end. ‘We’ve a personal lift to the penthouse,’ she said. Wyrecliffe drove the Renault in. It barely occupied half the space.

  ‘Not only your own castle, but a personal portcullis too,’ said Wyrecliffe.

  ‘It makes us feel safer,’ she said simply. ‘Chris, can you reach out of the window? Flick the red switch.’

  He did so, and the shutter gradually slid down behind them.

  ‘Now I’d like you to press the white button.’

  Wyrecliffe pressed the button and they were plunged into darkness. ‘Fuse blown?’

  ‘No. Now come here.’ Suddenly Taseena’s arms were around him, her soft hot lips against his neck, his ear and then his mouth. She kissed him deeply and passionately, her hands snaking across his chest. Wyrecliffe, overcoming his surprise, slid his hands into the mass of hair, feeling the back of her neck and the delicate shape of her skull. Cautiously, he felt his way to the swelling bulge of her blouse, where a nipple was already erect. Her breathing was coming harder now and she moved, above and across him in the driver’s seat. He heard her head hit the roof.

  ‘Sorry, it’s just a Renault 5,’ he laughed. ‘If you’d let me know I could have borrowed Jim’s old Mercedes,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’ He fumbled for the seat adjustment lever, and found it, pitching himself backwards by thirty degrees. Taseena’s head cracked sharply against his.

  Once the ouches and giggles had died away they got back to kissing. Her tongue slid deeply into his mouth. He slid his hands up her blouse and felt the silkier material of her bra, then lifted it so he could slide his hands onto her small, firm breasts. She stopped for a moment. He heard the soft sounds of her blouse being pulled over her head. His hands then had the free run over her flawlessly smooth back, breasts and shoulders. He could only imagine the flowing coffee colour of her curves, and of the thickening nipples he could feel in his hands. Her hair, heavy and perfumed fell into his face as she nibbled his lips. She then undid his shirt buttons, licked his hairy chest, sucked his nipples, and tugging playfully at the hair. She was moving her hips rhythmically, and he could feel the warmth of her crotch against his own, where a throbbing erection was constrained within his jeans.

  He tried to lift her up so that he could slide out of his trousers and pants, but only succeeded in jamming her against the roof, with his erection still trapped within his trousers. He cursed the car’s confined space. She giggled as he struggled, but banging her own knee against the handbrake.

  ‘You need a bigger car, Mr Wyrecliffe. Undressing in here is impossible,’ she said. ‘Sit still. I’ve an idea.’ There was a click. She gently touched his neck with something cold. ‘Keep absolutely still.’ She raised her hips above him, her breasts in his face. She moved a hand under herself onto his crotch, tracing the outline of his straining cock with her fingertips. She undid the zip, and slid her hands inside, to hook out his iron-hard prick, still caught in his underpants. She lowered the other arm between them. There was a metallic click, then the susurrus of a blade, slicing away his underpants, millimetre by millimetre, so close to his own engorged skin that he could feel the chill of the metal. He fought the anxiety, the vulnerability, the fear that she may slip. But she knew just what she was doing. When his cock breathed free, the feel of her hand on it was almost enough to make him lose control.

  He could hear her slit her own tights, and move
aside the crotch of her underwear. With one hand she took a grip on the barrel of his penis, and lowered herself so that he could feel the incredible heat of her lips, and her pubic hair brushing the tip of his glans. He had never been so breathlessly excited in his life.

  She pressed her lips against his ear and whispered. ‘I know you’re married. Does that mean I should stop?’

  Wyrecliffe grunted and thrust upwards, but her hand was still holding him. ‘Come on, you know what I want,’ he gasped.

  ‘You’ve got to be sure,’ she said playfully, thrusting the slick lips of her vagina against the straining tip of him. ‘I’m trouble and you know it. Do you want trouble?’

  ‘Yes, yes…YES,’ he said and pulled her down onto him as hard as he could. He surged immediately into her boiling, soaking depths with a pleasure that made him gasp. Taseena growled into his ear, going at him like an animal, seizing his hair, forcing him deeply and unmercifully into her. Their faces knocked and grazed each other, she bit him painfully on the bottom lip, holding his tender skin between her teeth as in a dozen thrusts she yowled her way to orgasm. Wyrecliffe felt he’d almost blacked out in ecstasy, but the sticky and cooling fluid in his groin brought him round. It was fifteen bruised minutes, five of them in darkness, before they were in any semblance of order. Wyrecliffe declined the offer of meeting her father in such circumstances. ‘I couldn’t look him in the eye,’ he said.

  Taseena laughed. ‘But just remember, you did say you wanted trouble.’

  ‘I did, I know it.’

  It was a prophecy that in later years he would ruefully recall. Taseena would turn out to be more trouble than he could ever have imagined. Mortal danger. Not just to his marriage, not just to his heart. But to his very life, and those of many others. If he had known, if he had any kind of clue, he later thought that he should have resisted that deadly allure. But even then. Even in the fullest of hindsight, he knew that he had not possessed the strength to deny her, or to deny himself. Whatever happened was his destiny.

  * * *

  Beirut

  February 1990

  After their torrid half hour in his car, Taseena disappeared for two weeks on a series of freelance magazine interviews across the Gulf. Wyrecliffe left a number of phone messages for her, but none was returned. Besides, he had other matters to think about. The Christian forces in Eastern Beirut had dissolved into a bloody power struggle between President Elias Hrawi, who had taken over from the assassinated Mouad, and Major General Michel Aoun. In two weeks of artillery duels, shooting and fratricidal retaliation, at least 350 people died and 1,700 were wounded. A stray mortar round hit the side of the AP office, but fortunately did not detonate. Two local reporters that Wyrecliffe knew disappeared in East Beirut, and Sandie Khoury, a cheerful New Jersey girl of Lebanese parentage who’d come back to Beirut to work as a producer for the German news agency DPA, lost a leg to a stray RPG round.

  Despite the mayhem, the BBC was busy moving people out of the bureau. Jim Moore was sent to Jo’burg as a breaking news firefighter. South African President F. W. de Klerk looked likely to free Nelson Mandela and the BBC needed a bigger team to provide round the clock coverage. By the middle of February, with fighting still raging, the BBC began officially cutting back its Lebanese resources in light of what it laughably called ‘the improving situation’. It wasn’t that noone was being killed in Lebanon, far from it, it was just much harder to stitch the killings into a narrative that could be summarised in a minute or less, and would grab attention. Wyrecliffe had a row with one harassed duty editor from the Six O’Clock News who had spiked a three-minute analysis, admittedly not one of his best, on the political manoeuvring between Maronite rivals Hrawi and Aoun. The duty editor, normally calm and reasonable, had in the end barked at him: ‘I’m sorry Chris, but the package you have given me doesn’t come across clearly for us. The Great British Public is pretty tired of Lebanon, they’ve had twenty years of it. If they wanted to get their head around anything so complex, we’ve always got Northern Ireland. I’ll pass it on to Newsnight. It’s probably more their thing.’

  There was even talk that the Beirut bureau would be left unstaffed, run as an offshoot of the Middle East editor’s domain in Jerusalem, and only used for flying visits. Naturally, that would come with an appropriately squeezed budget, likewise administered from the Israeli capital. Wyrecliffe managed to get plenty of soft features on BBC Radio, but little on TV. He fought Lebanon’s corner editorially and emotionally, but was slow to admit the real reason. Taseena. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. The only good news during that time was from upstairs. Lebanon wasn’t hot enough to justify AP keeping its crack photographer Craig Douglas there. It was rumoured he was being transferred to Moscow, or possibly to London to cover poll tax riots.

  Taseena’s phone call to him came out of the blue on Sunday night. She had just got back from Dubai, her bags still unpacked in the hall. That she had rung him immediately he found exciting. At first he talked work, but his mind was full of other imagined images, which he had the greatest difficulty untangling from the sound of her voice. Then she said something that changed everything.

  ‘I was sitting in the hotel in Doha, in a hot soapy bath, and I realised I missed you,’ she said.

  ‘I missed you too,’ he responded, his throat suddenly dry. ‘You seem to have been away for ages.’

  She invited him for a meal at her flat at the weekend, hostilities permitting. It seemed a heck of a long time to wait, but he readily agreed. He could switch his weekend duty with Jim. The lure of an intimate evening for two, away from work, away from everyone else. Perfect. The week dragged by, and when Saturday finally arrived, it was with trepidation, a bunch of flowers and an excellent Bekaa Valley red wine that he set off. He even found himself humming as he drove the trusty Renault up into Ashrafiyah, with the orangey glow of the setting sun behind him. She buzzed him up into her apartment, and met him at the door, wearing designer jeans, a pleated black blouse and a dazzling smile. From the buzz of conversation they were not alone. He fought against his disappointment. She kissed him on the cheek and led him through to the balcony, where a half dozen others were gathered absorbing the majestic view across to the sea. He was introduced to a well-known shipowner, Stavros Petrarchos. Rumoured to be a billionaire, Petrarchos’s thinning hair was dyed jet black. He was propped up by his fifty-something wife Hannah, drenched in jewellery and gold lamé. Their daughter, about fifteen but dressed like a child, was noisily sucking a drink. Finally, Taseena turned to a dapper and distinguished man of about sixty-five in a very expensive suit with a neat goatee beard.

  ‘Chris, this is my father,’ she said. ‘He’s a great fan of the BBC.’ She went out to the kitchen.

  ‘Call me Hamad. The full name, like all those in my so-extended family, is too terrifyingly long to contemplate.’ He smiled indulgently. Wyrecliffe admired the subtle way that Hamad alluded to his membership of the Saudi royal family. He and Wyrecliffe soon fell into a conversation about business and that, it gradually emerged, was the main reason for the meal. Beirut was still the beating commercial heart of the Levant, but was worried that it was increasingly losing banking and eventually commercial business to the safer but arid sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf.

  The food was excellent and the wine outstanding but Wyrecliffe longed to get Taseena on her own. It wasn’t to be. The women chatted in the kitchen, and the men sat and talked business in the lounge. When Wyrecliffe brought out dirty dishes, the women just stared at him for doing such an odd thing. He soon made his excuses and went to thank Taseena.

  ‘I’ll see you down to the car,’ she said. That alone was enough to get his heart beating, even though this time he was parked in the communal garage. Taseena joined him in the public lift, and he turned to her once it was underway. Wordlessly they looked into each other’s eyes, and then embraced. Her kisses were softer, more hesitant and circumspect than before, and Taseena soon broke off. Confused about her guarded body language
, Wyrecliffe asked about seeing her again. She replied. ‘I’ll have to see.’

  Two weeks later, Wyrecliffe was sitting in the AP’s coffee lounge leafing through magazines when he spotted the latest edition of the banking magazine that had sent Taseena on her trip around the Gulf. Her article was a monster five-thousand worder about tanker financing, but it was the pictures of the interviewees that grabbed Wyrecliffe’s attention. In tiny font on the top right corner of each picture were the credits: AP Craig Douglas. Far from travelling alone, Taseena had conspired to bring along the AP’s own ladies’ man on her luxury all-expenses-paid tour round the Gulf.

  Wyrecliffe threw the magazine over his shoulder and swore, prodigiously and inventively. When he looked up it was to meet the startled rabbit gaze of most of the AP bureau.

  * * *

  Trying to forget about Taseena was the hardest thing for Wyrecliffe. He felt a complete idiot. His fury at her for deceiving him with Craig Douglas didn’t really stand up to much scrutiny. First, of course, she had warned him that she was trouble. But she was just more than flesh and blood could resist. He had his own wife at home. Imogen was bringing up a child, Michaela, now two, with no real help from him except the money. He hadn’t seen them since Christmas, when they’d had a wonderful time. He adored Michaela and loved his wife dearly, but it was just too hard to be away for months with no female company. Almost every BBC reporter he knew, at least those in war zones, had flings or worse. It was part of the territory. Perhaps if this affair with Taseena fizzled out, he wouldn’t have to tell Imogen. He’d bottle up the guilt, along with the precious memories, and put them to the back of his mind.