“State.”
“State. Tell me about the ‘giving my life for something meaningful’ part.” She purposely misquoted him. Levity seemed the only safe refuge but, God, he was getting to her and she didn’t even understand how or why. He’d thrown her interview tape away and at any other time, with anyone else, she’d have scratched his eyes out, or at least hollered that her First Amendment rights were being infringed upon. Where was all the hard-boiled investigative cool she’d cultivated so long? Blown up, that was where, along with Boston and Washington and whatever else in between—Cuba, he’d said with a cynical smile, had taken a hit meant for Kennedy Space Center; both Kennedy and Vandenberg would be operational, he’d said, in seventy-two hours, as soon as new electronics could be flown up from Houston.
Flown? she’d asked on the tape that now blew through a Jerusalem street.
Flown, he’d replied with satisfaction, as if MIT had just beaten Harvard in the season’s big football game. We’ve had plenty of time to devise hardened shelters for our surveillance and other… critical aircraft. We’ll even have new weather and photoreconnaissance satellites up and running within a couple of months.
Suddenly, these and other things that he’d said began to sink in: Mark Beck, whose information was much better than hers could hope to be, was certain that the world would go on; more, that the US would continue to exist as an entity despite the, oh—she remembered him estimating the numbers, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners—eight or nine million initial and fifteen to thirty million subsequent related casualties.
“I can talk to you only in general terms until we reach an understanding, Chris.” This was his professional voice and he spoke to her with all the care he would have used with an enraged foreign potentate or an angry superior. “We need to send an on-site inspection team back home—some of our people to accompany UN representatives, the International Red Cross, various do-gooders and gloaters. We want a reporter on that team, someone we can trust, someone who’s going to have the right instincts and take the right direction.”
“Holy fuck,” she breathed, forgetting her manners. “Do we get Geiger counters, neat little radiation suits like you’ve got in the consulate? Security clearances?”
He grinned obliquely. “All of that and more—except for the security clearances: most of the others won’t have them; they won’t need them. You will. So we’ve got a lot of talking to do and the inevitable forms to fill out… if you’ve got the requisite amount of sand in your craw.”
“Will you be going?” she asked suspiciously, though she wanted to ask how long she’d live, afterward, if she agreed.
“You bet,” he said and for the first time put a hand on her waist in other than a professional manner.
“There’s more to this than what you’ve told me, of course.”
“Of course, but you’ll know everything you need to know when—”
“—I need to know it,” she finished for him, giggling. Then she leaned against him and rested her head against his shoulder: “Once we get there, how long have we got—will the radiation kill us, or what? I’ll need some pretty special communications gear….”
“Getting in and out are going to be the hard parts—there are lots of hysterical people over there right now. It won’t be the radiation that kills us; we can protect ourselves against that, and if everybody follows their instructions no one will get sick; it’s physical violence and the possibility of mechanical failure or human error we’ve got to worry about, just like on any other…”
She wondered what he had been going to say: mission, operation?
But then his hand, which had been demurely on her waist, slipped upwards and his face turned into her hair and he said, “And ourselves, of course.”
Before she could ask what he meant, Beck kissed her, tentatively at first and thereafter with all of the fervor that hid behind his eyes.
When her tongue was free for speech, she was breathing heavily: “God, I thought we’d never get to the good part. It’s okay if you sleep with one of your agents, then; this is by the book? Good spook procedure?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “Sleep with a newsie? I’m about to commit treason. Come on, Mata Hari; it’s time you saw the site of my fall from grace.”
His bedroom faced west, toward Tel Aviv and the sea; he opened the glass sliding doors and thin curtains blew in the wind, showing her a starry night so beautiful her eyes filled with tears and she hugged herself.
He noticed and said, “Just for tonight—tomorrow I’ll have the windows taped, even sealed with lead foil, if it’ll make you feel better.” Now it seemed that when he looked at her there was nothing else but her body on his mind.
Under that kind of scrutiny, as he unbuckled his crocodile belt and she remembered that it housed a deadly weapon, she felt naked in soiled work clothes. She hadn’t thought, until then, about how she must look—dirty and sweaty and wrinkled.
Pulling off his desert boots, he peered up at her: “Change your mind?” His tie was gone, shirt unbuttoned and hanging loose over a short-sleeved T-shirt.
He’d caught her off-guard. What was it with him? She was as accomplished a sport-fucker as the next. Resolutely she pulled her shirt overhead to prove it: she had no bra on beneath and her nipples rose sharply in the cool air. It was the end of the world, and she was wondering if he liked her breasts.
She liked his buns, his muscular thighs and the shimmer of muscle under his belly hair as he bent to pick up his clothes and hang them neatly on the back of his chair.
“A shekel for your thoughts?”
She’d been thinking that it had been a long time since she’d made it with someone who wore white jockey shorts and a matching undershirt: she was wondering if he got high, or did this often, or ever let the lady be on top. She couldn’t say that and she didn’t want to watch him appraising her body, so she said, trying to be graceful as she pulled off her sneakers without untying them, belly held in, “Are you married, Beck—Marc?”
“Either am or used to be, hard to tell. Is that a problem? If you’re having second thoughts…”
He came over to her and she thought that if he told her to forget it, she would, and run out of here, clothes in hand if she had to; she wasn’t used to feeling vulnerable, or clumsy, or shy, and the way he watched her made her feel all three.
And then he slid his hands around her waist and up her spine, saying, “…it’s a little late. I’m not letting you out of here until we both feel a whole lot better about life in general and one another in particular.”
He was just under six feet and his erection pressed hard against her crotch as he held her, keeping her mouth too busy for questions, letting his hands ask her body what he wanted to know.
Her one extravagance was outrageous silk bikinis; when he’d peeled her down to them he got on his knees for a closer look and at some point judiciously declared that he was sorry, but they weren’t going to make it through the night.
By then, in a stranger’s hands on the last night of the world as she’d known it, she was weeping freely, staring out beyond him at the universe which had witnessed mankind’s birth and now, probably, its death.
Standing, he saw her tears, tsk’d softly, picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bed she’d been studiously avoiding.
Like Beck, his bed looked appropriate, serviceable, but nowhere near as accommodating, as strong and supple and welcoming as it was.