After the conference Janet agreed to separate, individual television interviews with the four major American networks and then the English and the French and the German until at the end she was parroting her replies, dull-eyed and dull-eared, scarcely waiting for the predictable questions to be posed before going into her prepared and rehearsed and by now practically cliched answer.
She slumped in the back of the U.S. embassy car taking her back to the hotel, limp and wrung out, her mind hardly capable of sustaining a single thought and certainly not a continuous contemplation. Incredibly, there were still more cameramen and journalists at the Churchill. Janet pushed through them, refusing another questioning session, careless of the photographs being taken as she shuffled into the elevator to go up to her room.
There were call-back messages from her parents and Partington and Zarpas. Janet let herself drop backwards on to the bed, literally prostrated by the ordeal she had undergone, relegating everything to the following day.
The exhaustion from not sleeping at all the previous night overtook her but Janet did not lapse completely into sleep. It was a suspension, halfway between sleep and wakeful ness, a pleasantly lightheaded sensation: she wondered if this were what it was like to be a drug addict after a fix, suspended beyond the need to reason or worry or think, wrapped in the softest, thickest, most protective cotton wool. Everything had happened to her, so nothing else could, not any more: no more hurt to feel. No more pain, not more bruising. Safe, like she’d always wanted to be.
The telephone rang, distantly, but she ignored it. It stopped and rang again at once. Stopped and rang again. Stopped and rang again. And then again, worming its way into her semi-consciousness. She lifted it at last, without identifying herself, waiting for the caller to speak.
“I want to come up.”
“No.”
“We have to talk.”
“No.”
“You know we have to talk.”
“I said no.”
“Please!”
Janet couldn’t remember his pleading before. She remembered something else, though. We just didn’t see the curve until it was almost too late… everyone got their share. “What about?”
“You know what about.”
She had to know, completely. “Where?”
“Let me come up?”
We’ve had a wire in your hotel bedroom for weeks. Heard every sigh and groan. “No. Somewhere else.”
“You choose.”
Yes, thought Janet. She had to choose. At last. “Is your car here?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll use the emergency exit.”
Did Willsher and his men know about her use of the fire escape stairs? wondered Janet, as she pushed against the heavy locking bar and began to descend the stone steps. What Willsher knew-what anyone knew-didn’t matter any more.
Baxeter must have moved the Volkswagen because it was directly opposite the door through which she emerged. As she approached he leaned across as she always thought of him as doing and thrust the door open for her. Janet sat with her back partially against the door, determined to look directly at him.
“Do you want to drive around?” he said.
“I don’t mind.”
“It might be best.”
“I said I didn’t mind.”
Baxeter started the car and ground the gears like he normally did and Janet thought, why can’t I feel like I should feel! Why can’t I hate the bastard instead of feeling like I do about him! He took the road towards the mountains, the mountains where they’d first realized what was happening between them, and Janet recognized it at once. Unthinking or intentional?
Wanting to unsettle him Janet said: “The Americans know.”
“What!”
“About us, everything. Willsher told me today.”
Baxeter drove for several moments without responding. Then he said: “Shit!”
“That fits well enough a lot of what happened.”
“Everything worked out as it was planned,” Baxeter insisted, almost defiantly. “You got John back.”
“The psychologist thinks he’s going to be OK.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m waiting,” said Janet.
They were on the central plain now, in heavy darkness, away from any street or village lights. Baxeter coasted the car into the side of the road but didn’t look at her when he stopped. He said, simply: “It was an exchange.”
“The twelve extra men?”
Despite the darkness she was aware of his nodding. Baxeter said: “You know what it’s like in Beirut, faction fighting faction, gang fighting gang. The Shia group holding John were warring with a group holding twelve of our people… people we had to get safely back: Israel always gets its people back. You know that…”
Entebbe, remembered Janet. She said: “What was the deal?”
“We got our soldiers, the Shias got Americans delivered up to them, on a plate…”
“I can’t believe you did that!” said Janet, incredulous. Why not? Weren’t these people-all of them-capable of anything!
“Your arrival, all the publicity, was the way to do it. The idea was to leak information sufficiently accurate to persuade the Americans to go at a time and on a day when they would be expected. In return we got our hostages.”
“You knowingly set the Americans up!”
“ Appeared to,” qualified Baxeter. “Half an hour before the Americans landed we broadcast as supposed Shias exchanging last minute information on the wavelength we knew the Americans were monitoring. So they were warned well in advance. It was really the Shias who got ambushed.”
Janet was staggered by the matter-of-fact cynicism. Everyone got their share, she thought once more. “John!” said Janet, in abrupt awareness. “There was no need under that arrangement with the Shias for John to be actually gotten out!”
Baxeter looked at her at last: it was difficult for her properly to discern his features. “The Americans had to be successful, to mitigate any bad feeling between us if they discovered what was really happening. Which you tell me they have.”
“If the Americans hadn’t reached Kantari, you’d have got John out?”
Baxeter nodded again. “But it wasn’t necessary. The American assault was brilliant: they did it.”
“If you’d had to rescue John he would have been handed over at the embassy where we were, in Beirut? On the hill at Yarzy?” persisted Janet, in growing comprehension.
“Yes,” Baxeter confirmed.
“But not by a group of Israelis?”
“No.”
“That’s why I was allowed along!” Janet said. “You didn’t agree to my coming! You needed me, if the American assault didn’t work!”
“It was an insurance,” the Israeli conceded.
“Oh, you are!” Janet said. “You are a bastard.”
“Everything had to be covered,” Baxeter said.
At last, Janet thought: the complete, ugly, nasty, opportunistic truth at last. “Willsher said you conned me,” reflected Janet, distantly. “I never guessed how completely…” Her voice becoming harder, she demanded: “How much did you laugh at me? How much did everyone laugh at me?”
“No one laughed at you,” Baxeter insisted. “It wasn’t like that.”
“I deserve to be laughed at,” Janet said, reflective again. “I must have been the best comedy act in years!”