It did hurt; the stuff they were injecting into her was as thick as honey and the muscle of her arm complained bitterly. She gnawed her lip and Elint told her she was very brave.
Then Beck said to Elint, “Okay, I guess I can give you yours.”
The Semite shook his curly head: “Chassidim live or die according to God’s will.”
And Beck, who never let an argument go until he’d won it, said, “Suit yourself. Thanks. Thank the others for me.”
“I will,” said Elint. “And let me say that your Chris is all you told us and more. A fine girl. Well chosen. Shalom, Chris.” He waved as, bag snapped shut, he headed for the door. “Shalom, Beck.”
Beck followed him out and they whispered together again.
When he came back, she was slouched on his sofa, rubbing her arm, and he reached down from behind to kiss the top of her head. “I’m proud of you,” he said, though she had no idea for what.
Two hours later, when the windows shook in their frames as if a jet had broken the sound barrier directly overhead and shock waves made the floor under them shiver, they were lying in his bed.
Beck vaulted over her and had his hand on the telephone before it rang.
“Right. I see. Right away.”
The phone slammed down and he was pulling on his pants.
“What is it? What’s happened? Christ, if it’s another nuclear—”
“Conventional truck bomb. The consulate.” Shoes in hand, he was running toward the door, protective gear forgotten, shirttails flying.
“Wait! I want to go with you! It’s a story and you owe me—”
“Move, then,” he called back. “Slam the door hard when you leave.”
Trembling, she dressed—just the shirtwaist, no underwear, no stockings, shoes in hand so that she could run fast enough to catch him—and took the fire-exit stairs three at a time.
When she flung herself out the emergency exit, he was sitting there, the Plymouth idling, its door open for her.
He drove like a NASCAR racer, fingers white on the wheel and silent, watching all his mirrors with fanatical concentration, bumping up over median strips and wheeling down one-way streets so that she crammed her knuckles in her mouth and fastened her seatbelt.
At the compound gates, he deserted her again, leaving the car before it had truly stopped, his door ajar.
Barefoot, she charged after him, only to pull up short: he was talking to the same Marine who’d been on duty the first day she’d met him—the day it had happened. Suddenly she wondered what the big deal was: it was a conventional bomb—nothing heavy when compared to what they’d already been through.
But inside she could see devastation: ambulances, men with masks and guns and helmets, stretchers, body bags, an Israeli army truck unloading men to help dig out survivors.
Her fingers itched for pencil and paper; she’d left her bag in his apartment; she’d depend on her memory, she thought as she edged up close and tugged on his sleeve.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he put one arm around her, never breaking the stride of his conversation.
“And Dickson? You’re sure it’s him? What was he doing in there at this time of night?”
“Whoever came flying through his office window’s bagged and tagged as Dickson, Sir—only dental records’ll tell for certain. But I ID’d his class ring on the corpse and I checked him through the gate earlier this evening. He had a lot of catching up to do, he said.” The Marine had a hard helmet on, a government-issue respirator dangling unsnapped from one side of it; his face was grimy and streaked. “Sent Pickwick out for some of that Turkish coffee he likes, ’cause they ran out inside.”
“Pickwick. Did he come back?”
“Ah—no, Sir, not to my knowledge.” The Marine’s gaze rested on her. “Hiya, Miss Patrick. Nice to see you—alive.”
“Dickson’s dead?” she piped up.
“Very, evidently, Chris. All right, Sergeant, thank you. Carry on.”
Beck started to walk her back to his car.
“But… Sir? You’re the highest grade surviving Int—”
Over his shoulder, Beck called back: “Tap the next fool in line, Sergeant. And find Pickwick; have him put under close arrest, my authority.”
“Yes, Sir,” said the Marine sergeant.
“What’s hap—?” she started to ask.
Beck cut her off savagely: “Can you add, Chris? Two and two? If this isn’t a diversion, I’ve never seen one. And I think I know from what. So you can stay here and work for your paper, or you can come along and watch the shit hit the fan.”
She’d only seen that side of him once—when he’d held the hostage-taker at knife-point in the consulate, now a ruin of twisted metal and pulverized concrete behind them.
As they pulled away in the Plymouth, sirens began to scream.
Chapter 7
Ashmead was back in harness, sitting in a canvas-covered lorry pulled off the road out of the eastern campus of the Hebrew University, waiting for the twenty-millimeter tracers from Israeli air cover to signal that the terrorist raiding party was headed his way, barreling toward Jordan.
He shifted slightly and spoke into the voice-actuated transceiver threaded on the shoulder holster holding his SIG pistol and spare clips: “Test. This is Coach, check in.”
Across the road, where a little rise was silvered in moonlight, there was no movement. But Slick’s voice came out of the transceiver on Ashmead’s shoulder preceded by the little snap and slight clipping of his first word as the transceiver’s “send” mode kicked in: “Pitcher, check.”
Then the rest of them, in terse succession: “Batter, check,” said Jesse, lying prone at the bend in the road; “Catcher, check,” said Thoreau, from the lorry’s cab, dressed like an orange-grower but with his encrypt/decrypt communications gear, their link to one another and Netanayhu’s Saiyeret teams, taped to the seat beside him, and an Uzi on his knee; “Outfield, check,” said Yael, in her secondary command jeep, waiting with six of Zaki’s Israeli agents, a cleanup squad to pick off anybody who jumped for open country: with their night-vision goggles and their position on the high ground, Yael Saadia’s unit had the best seats in the house, with the possible exception of the Saiyeret chopper pilots, who had starlight-magnifiers and “tourist detection” radars that could spot a kefiya from a mile in the air.
Ashmead settled back, wiggling his arse to find a comfortable position despite his Saiyeret-issue uniform, complete with flash hood, all poly-sealed against radiation so that he was sweating like a pig, and his full kit—three extra magazines for his Galil, three flash-bang and three fragmentation grenades. As he ripped off the flash hood in disgust and stuffed it in his web belt—they were catching one and one half Rem per hour out here, no more than every American had caught unknowingly in the Fifties when the superpowers were testing—and rested his cheek against the infrared scope of the Galil rifle between his legs, Zaki chimed in too, though Ashmead hadn’t expected him to make it.
“Left field, check,” Zaki said laconically, and Slick let out a muffled whoop of pleasure to know that Zaki had finished his tasks in town in time to take up his position, opposite Jesse in a little gully beside the bend in the road around which the terrorists were going to come.
They really wanted this one—it would make up for losing Schvantz.
Ashmead’s team had gotten wind of the terrorist operation the second day they’d been in Jerusalem, but because it was Dow’s, they were told, an Agency operation—sort of, they were advised—Ashmead’s team had spent thirty-six hours sourcing it and reconfirming that it wasn’t official, wasn’t on the books, was just Dow and his Palestinian network striking a tandem blow for West Bank autonomy and Dow’s wallet. The whole time Ashmead’s team had been confirming, they worked on their own, informing no one, torqued down tight in their own operational fervor while they checked and rechecked everything and everyone involved.