He felt her relax, felt her mouth open to him, felt the warmth of her tongue against his. His heart was leaping, yet he felt calm. He felt an urgent need for her, not simply a physical need, but something crazier than that, something that shook him to his roots, like a man who kneels at a deep pool and knows he will never slake his thirst.
He unbuttoned her shirt with trembling fingers, undoing the buttons with one hand while he ran his other through her hair.
His hand cupped her breast, then slipped beneath her bra to caress naked flesh.
Her hands came up between them.
‘Are you planning to have your wicked way with me, Chief Inspector?’
She was grinning. Her cheeks were flushed by his love-making.
He nodded.
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I think it’s a good idea to move. It would be something of an embarrassment if the holy Gavril and his chums came back and found us humping away in here in front of the Virgin and Child in a manner to which they might not be accustomed.’
He extricated his hand, drawing his fingers across her nipple as he did so. She moaned and looked at him and smiled. He smiled back and started to button her shirt.
She unbuttoned it again herself the moment they were in his room. Tossing it on the floor, she reached behind her and unfastened her bra. He bent to her breasts, kissing and fondling them as though he’d never been with a woman before, and she arched her back while he licked her nipples. He cried out with the urgency of his need for her. She moaned, feeling her nipples harden and rise to his touch. His hands grown clumsy with need, he fumbled with the catch that held her skirt. It fell to the ground, and she stepped out of it, almost naked now. He thought he had never seen anything so utterly beautiful or so achingly desirable in his life before. And if her body stirred desire in him, her face, which he knew so well now, held that desire in balance, for he loved her and would not stop loving her.
She removed her pants and stepped out of them, then walked naked to the bed and lay down. He undressed, looking at her all the time. All the beautiful things in his life before this seemed to turn to ashes and crumble: the icon in the prayer room, the woods at Woodmancote Hall, all the women he had slept with, the voices of King’s College choir, his mother’s face – everything blurred into one thing and was devoured by flame, turned to ash by her.
Lying beside her, he felt like a youngster again, seeing a naked woman for the first time, touching her, preparing to make love to her. He ran his hands softly across her skin, and she gasped and reached out to bring him closer.
‘Now,’ she whispered. ‘Come into me quickly.’
He ran his fingers between her legs. She was ready for him. Carefully, he rolled onto her, and positioned himself to push inside her.
The moment he did so, she cried out and pushed him away hard. He fell onto the bed, and she pushed herself to a sitting position. She was shaking and crying out.
‘Get off me! Get off me!’
The words came flooding out of her again and again. Ethan lay watching, shocked by the suddenness of her reaction, then filled with understanding.
She was still shaking, but no longer crying out, when he moved higher on the bed and put his arm round her. She was staring at the ceiling as if he didn’t exist, and tears were welling from her eyes and rolling unhindered down her cheeks.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’ll see. This was a mistake. It was my mistake to think you were ready. I didn’t think, I was too full of needing you. Just rest. Take it easy. We’ll do this later, at the right time.’
She did not answer at once. Time passed and she remained silent, and he feared she had returned to her earlier state. It was not so long, after all, he told himself, since she had been so brutally raped. He had thought that making love with him would erase the taint of it, but he’d been wrong.
The monks returned, and their voices could be heard in the corridors. Ethan did not seek them out. This was his business, and Sarah’s. It was the one thing Gavril and his friends could not help with.
She stirred next to him, then turned and smiled.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You must have wondered what was going on.’
‘I knew exactly what was happening. You don’t have to apologise. There are more important things going on at the moment than us making love.’
She shook her head.
‘At the moment, there’s nothing more important. You can scarcely guess how much you mean to me, especially after…what happened. I won’t let Aehrenthal and his thugs take this away from us. You must have known I wanted you, you must have been able to tell. I don’t know what happened, but I don’t mean it to happen more than I can help. I’m going to move my things in here with you. You’ll have to explain to Gavril. I’m sleeping with you every night.’
‘I think they’re back, by the way. Can I smell food?’
‘They ate ages ago. I’ve no idea what they’re up to now. I think it’s time to get dressed and face the music.’
Gavril and the others were in the little room where they held conferences. They looked up with surprise when Ethan and Sarah came in, but no one said anything.
Gavril looked up as they entered.
‘Ethan. Sarah. Come in and sit down. I have some news for you.’
They took their places in silence. It could only be bad news, Ethan thought. What other sort had there been recently?
‘We’ve just been talking about this,’ Gavril said. ‘The news was waiting for us when we got back from weapons training. Aehrenthal has someone in England. They went to Woodmancote Hall and found your grandfather’s journal. They have the coordinates too. Aehrenthal is in Libya even as we speak.’
25
Oea
Getting into Libya was one thing. Getting a permit to go exploring in the deep desert was something else. Sarah carried the fake passport that had been organised for her by Lindita. The three of them travelled with a group of six monks. No one wore clerical garb. They brought with them a sheaf of false documentation in the name of the Centrul de Istorie Comparata a Societatilor Antice, the Centre for Comparative History and Ancient Society, based in the history faculty of Bucharest University. The telephone number, fax number, and email address all led to an office in Piatra Neamt, where they would be answered by operators well-versed in the background and likely plans of the expedition members.
If getting to Ain Suleiman was hard, harder still was it to get hold of weapons. Gavril knew Aehrenthal’s capabilities and knew he would not travel without guns. It was highly likely the two teams would meet at some point, quite probably at Ain Suleiman, should they get there. If fighting broke out, they had to be prepared.
One day Gavril asked Ethan to step outside the hotel they were staying in. They were staying in the capital, Tripoli, the ancient Oea.
As he stepped out, Ethan looked back and saw Sarah sitting by a downstairs window, gazing out at the street. A sand devil, come from God knows where after days without rain, danced teasingly in front of her, then went off spinning for a while among the traffic. She did not seem to notice it. If there were dervishes, they were in her brain, whirling like atoms in fancy dress. From a loudspeaker in the hotel came a burst of Arab music, bewildering and passionate, its plangent melody caught and given strength by the tap-tapping of a small drum.
‘We need to slip away,’ said Gavril. ‘This is still a dictatorship. There are eyes everywhere, and they like to follow foreigners. Come this way. And try not to look as though you’re doing anything suspicious.’
They walked away from the harbour, across to the entrance to the Old City, the Medina. Father Gavril – who wore jeans and a black leather jacket – had already visited this surviving district of the pre-Italian period, filled with winding suqs, artisan workshops, mosques and Qur’an schools. Ethan thought of his grandfather. Had he wandered down these same alleyways, bought bread at these bakers, passed these brightly painted doorways? It all seemed timeless, but for the plat
es in souvenir shops bearing portraits of Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, or the tubes of Crest toothpaste.
Gavril guided them to an old cafe opposite the Ottoman Clock Tower. A boy offered to shine their shoes for one dinar each. No sooner had they sat down than the boy got to work, applying liquid polish and spit before stropping and buffing as though his life depended on the brightness of the shine he could raise.
At other tables, old men played backgammon, their fingers fluid as they moved the counters with bewildering speed back and forwards over antiquated boards. From time to time they would pause to smoke their shisha pipes, inhaling fragrant smoke.
Gavril ordered mint tea, a concoction of green tea in a silver pot stuffed to the brim with mint leaves and sugar. It was sweet beyond measure, but deeply refreshing. With the tea came a plate of baklava.
‘Not a great place for diabetics,’ declared Ethan.
Gavril nodded and took a sip of the hot tea.
‘Ethan,’ he said, ‘I need your help. I don’t mean you haven’t been the greatest help already. But this is…different.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ve told you before that we need weapons. All my people are well trained in firearms, and knowing what we do of Aehrenthal, and knowing we could well bump into him, I don’t want us to be unarmed.’
‘But you can’t just walk up to the nearest gun shop in Tripoli and come away with a little arsenal. Don’t worry, I had to leave my gun behind at the airport as well, and I feel as naked as you do. How can I help?’
The shoeshine boy finished Ethan’s feet. Ethan looked down and, to his surprise, he found himself gazing into a mirror. He parted with his dinar and thanked the boy, using one of his newly acquired Arabic phrases. The boy pocketed the money and moved on to Gavril’s shoes.
‘There’s something only you can do, Ethan. I don’t know how it will work, or whether you can pull it off, but I don’t think we have any choice.
‘There’s a small office here in the Suq al-Mushir. It’s manned by three of your compatriots, two kids of about nineteen and one older man, maybe your age. The organisation they work for is a charity registered in the UK. It’s called We Are Palestine, and its stated aim is the collection and distribution of money for various building projects in Gaza and the West Bank. In fact, very little of the money they collect reaches either place, at least, not in the form of building materials.
‘We Are Palestine is a Hamas-backed front organisation whose real purpose is to buy and smuggle arms across the Egyptian border into the Gaza Strip and, by a more circuitous route, the West Bank. The border police couldn’t give a damn what goes through, and Gaza is controlled by Hamas, so it isn’t hard getting material through.’
The shoeshine boy halted and held out his hand. Gavril smiled and handed him twice the agreed amount. The boy grinned and went off in search of more customers.
‘I’m a man of God,’ Gavril said, ‘or, at least, I’m supposed to be. Yet here I sit, talking about weapons while this poor child scrapes a living polishing my shoes.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Ethan asked. The tea was warming him inside. Though this was the Mediterranean, the weather was chilly.
‘I’ve been preparing for this for a long time,’ he said. ‘We’ve long known that tackling Aehrenthal would involve weaponry, so we’ve made provisional arrangements for several parts of the Middle East and North Africa. I want you to go to WAP’s office and offer them a lot of money. We’ll give you a cover story. Say there will be a lot more in future, but explain that you need some guns immediately, that you want to hit an Israeli target in southern Egypt.’
‘And you think they’ll give me the guns just like that?’
Gavril poured more tea into his glass and drank it all in one gulp. Opposite, people had started to head for a little mosque.
‘We’ll give you money. Some things endure in this world, and greed is one of them. Whether they really love the Palestinians or are just getting off on being out here on the cutting edge of left-wing activism, the money will get them moving. There are so many weapons passing from hand to hand round here, they won’t mind handing a few on to you.’
WAP’s office consisted of two dingy rooms at the rear of a flyblown Ottoman-era building that clung on like a ghost at the end of a long alleyway studded with firmly closed doors. Its wrought-iron window grilles and intricately carved doorway had seen better days. It had served as the city’s largest Qur’an school under the Karamanlis, then as a brothel for European women brought to these shores by Barbary pirates under the Ottomans, then as a halfway house for Sicilian peasants newly arrived in the quarta sponda during the Italian occupation, and finally as a trade union reserve office under Qadhdhafi’s Jamahariya.
The sign on the door was in Arabic, badly written and peeling, Nahnu Filastin. Someone had taken a fibre tip pen and scrawled beneath it the initials WAP.
Ethan knocked on the door. He made it a loud knock. They had to think he was confident about turning up here unannounced. In fact, he had seldom felt so vulnerable. It reminded him of the times he’d knocked on doors as a beat policeman, never knowing who or what might lie in waiting: a Yardie with a gun, a pissed-off gangster with a baseball bat, a pit bull terrier on a short leash.
It took several knocks, then someone shuffled across the floor and opened up. Ethan’s host was a man aged about thirty, on the scruffy side, smoking a very pungent reefer of locally grown kif. He looked barely alive, as though the hashish had wandered into dangerous recesses of his brain.
‘Sabah al-khair,’ he muttered, then, beneath his breath, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘I’m not the fuck at all, son,’ answered Ethan. ‘I’ve come for a friendly chat, and it’s time you woke up or missed the opportunity of a lifetime. Can I come in?’
Taken aback, Mr WAP tried to extend a limp hand, failed, and shoved it back inside his trouser pocket. He stood aside to let Ethan pass inside.
As he did so, a woman’s voice came from the first room.
‘Bob? What the fuck’s going on. Who is it?’
To Ethan’s surprise, the woman who emerged from the dingy, poorly lit office, was not the raddled harridan he’d expected, but a pretty young woman wearing a burnous and with henna tattoos on the backs of her hands. She had blonde hair, tied back behind her head, and twinkling eyes. Ethan guessed she must be about twenty-one.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Been to a wedding last night. I had my hands hennaed. Like them?’
Ethan smiled and nodded. Her slim hands seemed wrapped in brown lace.
‘Would you like me to come back at a better time?’ asked Ethan.
The woman shook her head.
‘Better get it over with, eh? It’s a bit of a relief to talk to somebody who speaks bloody English.’
She looked past Ethan to where Bob stood, bewildered, holding the door close to his chest as though he feared it might run away.
‘Bob,’ she said, ‘why don’t you close the door and go back inside and have a nice sleep?’
Bob hesitated for about five seconds, then recollected himself and went to a door in the far wall. It closed behind him with a heavy clunk.
‘What can I do for you, stranger?’ she asked, obviously taken by the contrast between Bob and Ethan. ‘Why don’t you take a seat? Over there, just toss the books off.’
She pulled a seat up beside him.
‘My name’s Ethan,’ he said. ‘Ethan Taylor.’ It had occurred to him that even this woman, buried away in the heart of old Tripoli, might have heard of him and his devilish deeds.
‘Helena,’ she said. ‘Helena Mayberry. I’m Bob’s assistant, at least that’s what they sent me out here to do. Bob’s not very together at the moment. He thinks Pete Doherty sent him a message. Well. You’ll have to put up with me instead. I hope that doesn’t upset you.’
‘It certainly doesn’t.’ Ethan had gathered from Helena’s smiles and body language that Bob was probably dreadful in the sack, and that sh
e thought herself an English rose languishing in the far, far realms of Barbary and just longing to be properly shagged. Maybe it was just as well, Ethan thought. He didn’t fancy using the subtle arts of seduction on Bob.
They talked for over an hour. Helena was puzzled by Ethan’s offer, and even more by his demand, but she was relatively new to the Palestine Aid game, and thought this must be the sort of thing that went on all the time over here. She knew all about the weapons smuggling into Gaza and the West Bank. They didn’t take stuff across by sea much now. The Israeli boats didn’t come this far across, but they kept a tight watch on the Gaza coast. The Italians had started patrolling in Libyan waters, to turn back would-be migrants heading for Europe. Most of the arms went by the desert route.
‘Where are you staying?’ she asked. She’d told him she had graduated from Bolton with a degree in post-structural literary studies. Her attempt to explain it was shipwrecked on her own incomprehension of any of the books she’d read or lectures she’d attended. She was one of those popular girls in a gap year, a 2:2 or a third in her pocket, yet never really educated, a party-pooper girl, all blotched mascara and bad judgement, her pale eyes and golden hair suffering under a too hot sun.
‘I make it a rule not to give out my address,’ he said. ‘This is enemy country. You need to be careful. Mossad have been sniffing round, I think they’re on to me. Keep your door locked and don’t go out for a few days. You’ll be all right once I leave Tripoli.’
‘You wouldn’t like me to come along, would you?’ she asked. ‘I’m a bit fed up here, to tell you the truth. I mean, the Israelis are pigs and that, and the Palestinians should have their own state, right? But I have to tell you, I’m pissed off with Bob. The next boyfriend will have to be a lot more together. And a lot more use in bed.’
She smiled a come-on smile and licked her lips. She was pretty enough and probably hot stuff beneath the burnous, but Ethan withdrew from her mentally. His thoughts were with Sarah. He hadn’t spoken to her since the unfortunate incident in Romania, but as often as they met there was electricity between them. Their eyes would meet and pass, then return to each other and rest.
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