All of her limbs became spastic.
Jerking, twisting, out of control.
Her eyes were so large, the whites dominated. They seemed to spin. Her chest heaved as she fought to breathe.
On her back now, her head slamming back and forth on the cement floor.
“The brain is the last to go,” Colonel Salmi said. “It is aware throughout that something unfathomable is happening to the rest of the body. We judge the terror quotient to be extremely high, though there is little problem of control. The terror aspect is high for spectators, also.”
Ramad did feel a little twitch or two deep in his guts, observing this ritual.
Abruptly, she died.
“Less than four minutes,” the air commander said. “It is very efficient.”
Salmi was watching him closely, Ramad knew. This was as much a test of himself as it was an observation of results.
“Very efficient,” Ramad agreed. His stomach still felt a little queasy, but that was because he was so close to the action.
He knew the woman. She was a second cousin he had not seen in several years. He wondered what her crime had been.
Perhaps simply that she knew him.
“Do you still wish to proceed?” Salmi asked.
“Absolutely.”
“With which agent?”
“All three, I think, Colonel. It would be well to let our adversaries know the range of our choices.”
Salmi smiled for the second time in years.
Ten
After the fifth and final simulated exercise, Ahmed al-Qati and his company commander, Captain Ibn Rahman, flew back to El Bardi to meet with the company commanders of his other three companies. They spent an afternoon planning continuing drills and approving requisitions for supplies. There were four disciplinary problems for the battalion commander to address, all of them involving men late for something — to work, to formation, back from leave.
Neither al-Qati nor Rahman described what they were doing at Marada Air Base, though he was certain that the three commanders he had left behind at El Bardi were nearly overcome with curiosity. They did not know how fortunate they were, not knowing. Al-Qati himself, as soon as Ramad had revealed the plan, had gone into a shock that was difficult to conceal. For hours, his body had seemed removed from his mind. The mind was divided, normal functions occurring by rote on one side, and the other side desensitized, three or four steps removed from reality.
He forced himself to attend to routine.
Then al-Qati took a long bath, shaved, and patted the last of his last bottle of Aqua Velva over his face and neck. He dressed in a fresh uniform, commandeered a Volvo from the motor pool, and drove to Tobruk.
He parked in front of the Seaside Hotel and went into the lobby to call Sophia’s room.
“Ahmed! You are here!”
“Only by a stroke of fortune, and only for tonight. I am inviting you to dinner. If you do not have other plans,” he added lamely.
“But I am not hungry,” she said, “except for your company. If you would like to come to my room now, we will find dinner later?”
He resisted the urge to skip his way across the lobby and up the stairs to her second-floor suite like some carefree youngster.
She was waiting behind the partially opened door, peering through the crack at him as he advanced down the hall. When he reached her room, she pulled the door wide. Her smile was like the radiant beam of searchlights.
Her hair was piled high and wrapped with a towel, as if she had just emerged from her bath. She was wearing… what was it?… a peignoir. Her full breasts thrust at the loose, almost sheer fabric, and he found the effect nearly as exciting as her total nudity.
“You are so beautiful,” he said.
“Come to me, Ahmed.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist, and drew him tightly to her. Leaning back to look up at his face, she raised up on her toes to kiss him.
“I missed you.”
“And I you,” he confessed.
“Are you really hungry?”
“My appetite seems to have vanished.”
She reached behind him, to push the door shut, then led him toward her bed.
They made love, intense and perhaps a bit ineptly, for nearly an hour, then went downstairs for a dinner that became rushed toward the end of the entree. He was aware of the flush that climbed up her throat and spread over her cheeks. He was rattled enough that he could not even remember what entree he had ordered and consumed.
Al-Qati paid the bill, over tipping the effusive waiter, and they hurried back to her room and spent a leisurely two hours satisfying themselves yet again.
In the early hours of the morning, with the French doors to the balcony flung wide and the lazy circles of the overhead fan creating a wispy breeze that cooled his flesh, Ahmed al-Qati decided he was very much in love.
He told her so.
“I am glad to hear you say it, my darling, for I wanted you to be the first to speak. I, too, love you.”
Al-Qati sighed deeply, as lazy and content as he had been in years.
“I worry about our future,” Sophia told him.
“What? What is there to worry about?”
“My husband, my almost ex-husband, can be expected to be vindictive.”
He smiled in the dark. “We will not concern ourselves with him. I will see to your protection.”
“And I worry about you, Ahmed. From the little you have told me, I know you must do dangerous things.”
“They are not so dangerous.”
“You lie to make me feel better,” she said.
“They are not so dangerous, most of the time. Usually, they are quite boring. After this operation, I will be back in El Bardi performing boring tasks, and then we will be together almost all of the time.”
“What is it about this operation that makes it so perilous, Ahmed? Could you resign your position before it occurs?”
“Resign? No, I do not think so.”
“I have some money,” she said. “Money I have not told you about. You could quit.”
There was so much concern in her trembling fingertips as they stroked the side of his neck, and his distaste for Ramad was so near the surface, that he told her.
“Before you say anything,” Martin Church told George Embry, “sit down.”
Embry sat in the chair facing Church’s desk. “I received a message from Cummings.”
“Well, forget it. The DCI couldn’t convince the security council, and Icarus is history. Pull her out of Tobruk. I’ve got to call Wyatt and tell him to stand down.”
Embry ignored him, saying, “It was a long message.”
“Long,” Church said absently. He was so incensed with the DCI and his petty and self-serving games that he couldn’t focus properly.
“Yeah, a long, long message. You want to know what she said?”
“You’re going to tell me, no matter what.”
“Yup. She’s in love with the subject.”
“She what!” Martin Church yelped.
George Embry held up his left hand, palm out. “Careful, Marty. Remember your blood pressure.”
“She can’t be in love with him! Goddamn it! That’s just not done.”
“Hey,” Embry said, “you’ve got to give her credit for telling us.”
“How can one of our agents fall in love with a goddamned Libyan terrorist? Tell me that!”
The comers of Embry’s mouth dipped. “He doesn’t really fit the definition, Marty. Our army Rangers at Benning trained him, after all.”
“And Cummings has fallen for the guy. Jesus! The whole damned world’s going to hell.”
“I don’t think it affects her job,” Embry said.
“Christ! If you believe that, you’re nuts, too!”