The Kobra Manifesto

'Auschwitz,' she said.

'You were only a child.'

'Yes. Four years old.'

Light flashed and this time she cried out and I held her close so that she'd feel less afraid, my feelings ambivalent and impossible to relate: she was a female of the species and we were making what kind of love we were able and I wanted to protect her from the storm, but I would put the chances at fifty-fifty that she'd brought me in here to get me killed.

'Oh my God, darling.'

She seemed to think this was an English idiom.

In the tropical heat of the room she smelled fresh and magnificent, the animal scents pouring from her body. If it weren't for this I would have been useless to her because the libido was having to compete with the forebrain and the forebrain was concerned with a possible threat to life. I didn't think she would have brought an unknown male to her room because she was bored with the members of the Kobra cell or because they were bored with her frustrated carnality, driving her to take anyone available. Nymphomania is a common mechanism of women terrorists, often expressed in lesbianism but not always; and Shadia could simply be on a sex trip tonight, trying to relieve her tension: the cell was in touch with the Secretary of Defense and some kind of rendezvous might have been agreed and the most dangerous phase in this situation is the rendezvous. James Burdick could draft in a regiment of marksmen to the point of exchange and they knew that.

But I preferred to assume this was a Venus trap.

They can work both ways.

'How did you bruise your shoulder like this?'

'In a car smash,' I said.

'Where?'

'London.'

Normally the trap is one way because the woman — or sometimes the boy — doesn't know anything classified: the object is simply entrapment. But Shadia was more than the routine bait: she was informed and had access to almost limitless intelligence within the Kobra cell, or they wouldn't have needed her at the rendezvous.

She lay quiet, jerking a little when the next flash came, then lying still again. The rain was a steady roaring: we couldn't see it because of the shutters; it could have been anything, a thousand drummers.

'Are you here for a story?' she asked me, close to my ear.

'What sort of story?'

'I mean are you a journalist?'

She spoke in Polish all the time now.

'No. I'm a shipping agent.'

'Of course. They told me.'

Three seconds.

'Who did?'

But don't sound too interested because you don't mind people asking questions about you.

'The manager.'

Pass off.

'He's a very good chap-he's given me a lot of advice about the shipping situation. Apparently the Booth Line's got it pretty well sewn up.'

'He is a nice man, yes. With that wife-have you seen her?'

'Yes.'

'Oh God, what a face!' She paused. 'Maybe if I asked him, he might — ' she used her fingers on me and the bed shook to her low laughter.

Flash.

The thunder took a little time now. The sound of the rain seemed less.

I watched the door.

'I thought you were a journalist,' she said.

There wouldn't be any specific action I could take because they wouldn't come singly but in the three to four seconds available I could reach the knife and swing her in front of me, the point at her throat.

She didn't know I'd seen the knife. It was in the top drawer and I'd left the drawer an inch open because the handle wasn't easy to pull. She had been a few minutes in the bathroom, earlier; it was only a paper knife but adequate.

'Why should I be?' (Why should I be a journalist?)

She let it go but came back to it later and took it the whole way, letting out information and feeling it for the response, then letting some more out, like a thin-drawn line: the American girl was 'quite famous' and she and her friends were 'looking after her' and didn't want any journalists snooping around, so forth.

For ten or twelve minutes she worked within the precise confines of the Kobra cover released to the press and made only two small mistakes: she didn't ask me how I'd arrived in Lagofondo and invite a slip; and she didn't ask me if I'd booked ahead at this hotel. She could have passed off both questions in a loose ad lib context: they'd had trouble getting seats on the Panair plane; and the hotel had tried to give them double rooms because there were no singles left; or any one of a dozen variations.

I filled in as necessary: I thought they were a linguist group because I'd overheard some of their conversation in the dining-room (because that was why they'd taken their meals there: to be overheard); it would be a pleasure to meet the quite famous young American girl (appropriate interest theme); my firm had an option on a small-boat charter operation in Bermuda and I might be called out there at any time (gratuitous but useful as projected cover: I would have, to leave here when Kobra did, and might do it overtly at least as far as the first airport in transit.) In the absence of data I was assuming two things and both could be wrong and one could be fatal if wrong: that the exchange of the hostage wouldn't take place in Brazil, and that she hadn't brought me here to pin me for killing but to tap me for information.

'It's going away,' she said, 'the storm.'

'Yes.'

She moved again, throwing her long hard body across mine and covering my face with her hair, talking incessantly in her own tongue, goading herself to the edge of frenzy in the heat of the night and lying still, in the end, lying still with the tears streaming in the glow of the lamp. 'I hate you,' she said.

'I know.'

'Do you know why?'

'Yes. The thing is,' I said, 'you won't let yourself.'

Then the phone began ringing.

The moon was behind cloud and it was almost totally dark and I didn't see the thing until it sprang up with a screech right in front of me with one of its wings hitting my face as it took off.

I lay perfectly still for ten minutes, listening for any sounds from below. Faint voices rose but then- tone hadn't changed: they assumed it was normal for a buzzard to screech in the night. The bloody things were black and they roosted on the tiles and I'd known that and I should have been prepared for them and I wasn't I began moving again, testing each tile before I put my weight on it Some of them made slight cracking sounds as my movement displaced them, and I stopped every time it happened.

The doctor hadn't arrived yet Within twenty minutes I judged I was above the room where they were talking. I couldn't tell whether they were in Pat Burdick's room but assumed they were not; I couldn't hear Shadia's voice and further assumed she was in the girl's room, keeping her company until the doctor came. When the phone had rung she'd got off the bed and taken it a little distance so that I couldn't hear the caller's voice. In a few seconds she'd hung up and got her bath robe and left me without saying anything.

It had been too dangerous to try getting close to the Kobra quarters because the corridors were open to the courtyard and without visual cover so I phoned a complaint through to the desk about the noise people were making and the man at the switchboard said the little Americana was ill with a fever and the medico had been summoned from Manaus.

I moved again on the tiles, lying on one side and resting my ear on the baked clay surface. The voices were no louder because there was too much space between the overlapping curves; but I could hear occasional words, some in Polish and a few in poor English with a Spanish accent: Ramirez. From what I'd seen of the Kobra cell, Zade was the leader and Kuznetski his second in command. Ramirez was specifically a technician, as an expert on explosives; Ventura appeared to be the least disciplined member of the group and I'd heard Zade cut him short once or twice in the dining-room when he'd begun straying from the conversational subjects appropriate to their cover. Sassine talked very little but I didn't have the impression that he was intimidated by either Zade or the group as a whole: I put him down as a slow-burn operator who preferred listening and assessing what was said. Shadia had given nothing useful away when I'd been in her room but she had the reputation of being a ruthless and dedicated activist and a formidable adjunct to any task force; I suspected she had joined the group on account of some sexual involvement, probably with Zade.