«Arab?»
«No.»
«Israeli?»
«No, and I wouldn’t broach that speculation too broadly.»
«Nonsense. The Mossad has a broad spectrum of activities… But, if you will, please answer my question. Remember, I’ve spent most of my service on the other side of the world. Just why is this woman such a priority-red?»
«She’s for sale.»
«She’s what …?»
«She goes wherever there’s unrest, rebellion, insurgency, and sells her talents to the highest bidder—with remarkable results, I might add.»
«Forgive me, but that sounds balmy. A lone woman walks into caldrons of revolt and sells advice? What does she do, take out advertisements in the newspapers?»
«She doesn’t have to, Geoff,» replied the chairman of MI-6, returning to the conference table and sitting down somewhat awkwardly as he adjusted the chair with his left hand. «She’s a scholar where destabilization’s concerned. She knows the strengths and weaknesses of all the warring factions, as well as the leaders and how to reach them. She has no lasting allegiances, moral or political. Her profession is death. It’s as simple as that.»
«I don’t think that’s simple at all.»
«The result is, not the beginning, of course, not where she came from… Sit down, Geoffrey, and let me tell you a brief story as we’ve pieced it together.» The chairman opened a large manila envelope in front of him and removed three photographs, enlargements of rapidly taken candid shots of a woman in motion. The face in each, however, was clearly in focus, the sunlight bright. «This is Amaya Bajaratt.»
«They’re three different people!» exclaimed Geoffrey Cooke.
«Which one is she?» posed the chairman. «Or is she all three?»
«I see what you mean …» said the foreign service officer hesitantly. «The hair is different in each—blond, black, and, I assume, light brown; short, long, and mid-length—but the features are different … yet not markedly so. Still, they are different.»
«Flesh-toned plastic? Wax? Control of facial muscles? None is difficult.»
«Spectrographs would tell you, I should think. At least with respect to the additives, the plastics, and the wax.»
«They should, but they don’t. Our experts say that there are chemical compounds that can fool photoelectric scans, or even a refraction of bright light that can do the same—which means, of course, they don’t know and won’t risk a judgment call.»
«All right,» said Cooke. «She’s presumably one or all three of these women, but how the devil can you be sure?»
«Reliability, I suppose.»
«Reliability?»
«We and the French paid a great deal of money for these photographs, each from covert assets we’ve used for years. None of them cares to cut off a valuable financial source by providing us with a fake. Each believes he’s captured Bajaratt on film.»
«But where was she going? From Basse-Terre to the Anegada, if it is the Anegada, is well over two hundred kilometers—during a couple of raging storms. And why the Anegada Passage?»
«Because the sloop was spotted off the coast of Marigot—it couldn’t make it into the shore for the rocks, and the small harbor was being whipped to smithereens.»
«Spotted by whom?»
«Fishermen who service the hotels on Anguilla. The sighting was also confirmed by our man in Dominica.» Noting Cooke’s bewilderment, the chairman continued. «Our man flew to Basse-Terre, following our lead from Paris, and ascertained that a woman of the approximate age of the Bajaratt in these pictures chartered a boat with a tall, muscular young man. A very young man. That corresponded to Paris’s information that a female of her general age and description—presumably using a false passport—flew out of Marseilles in the company of such a youngster to the island of Guadeloupe, two islands, actually, as you well know, Grande- and Basse-Terre.»
«How did Marseilles customs make the connection between the boy and the woman?»
«He couldn’t speak French; she said he was a distant relative from Latvia placed in her charge after his parents died.»
«Damned improbable.»
«But perfectly acceptable to our friends across the Channel. They disregard anything north of the Rhône.»
«Why would she travel with a teenager?»
«You tell me. I haven’t the vaguest idea.»
«And to repeat, where was she going?»
«A larger conundrum. She’s obviously an experienced sailor. She’d know enough to get into shore before it struck, especially since the sloop had a radio, and alerts were being broadcast all over the area in four languages.»
«Unless she had a rendezvous that had to be met on time.»
«Naturally, it’s the only plausible answer, but at the all too conceivable loss of her life?»
«Again, improbable,» agreed the former MI-6 control. «Unless there were circumstances we know nothing about… Go on; you’ve obviously built something.»
«Something, not a great deal, I’m afraid. On the premise that a terrorist is rarely born a terrorist but becomes one through events, and on the strength of reports that although multilingual, she was heard speaking a language that was damn near impossible to understand—»
«For most Europeans that language would be Basque,» interrupted Cooke quietly.
«Precisely. We sent a deep-cover unit into the provinces of Vizcaya and Alva to see what they could dig up. They traced down the story of a particularly nasty incident that took place a number of years ago at a small rebel village in the western Pyrenees. The sort of thing that’s memorialized in mountain legends, passed down through generations.»
«Something like My Lai or the Babi Yar?» asked Cooke. «Wholesale slaughter?»
«Worse, if possible. In a raid against the rebels, the entire adult population of the village was executed by an unsanctioned rogue unit—adult being twelve years and older. The younger children were forced to watch and left to die in the mountains.»
«This Bajaratt is one of those children?»
«Let me try to explain. The Basques living in those mountains are very isolated. Their custom is to bury their records among the northernmost cypress trees in their territory, and attached to our unit was an anthropologist, an expert in the mountain people of the Pyrenees who could speak and read the language; he found those records. The last few pages were written by a young female child who described the horror, which included the beheading of her parents in front of her eyes by bayonets, sharpened as her father and mother watched their executioners honing their blades against the rocks.»
«How horrible! And that child is this woman Bajaratt?»
«She signed her name Amaya el Baj … Yovamanaree, which is the closest thing in Basque to the Spanish ‘jovena mujer,’ young woman. There followed a single phrase in perfect Spanish. ‘Muerte a toda autoridad’—»
«‘Death to all authority,’» Cooke translated. «Is that it?»
«No, two things more. She added a final note, and, mind you, a child of ten wrote it. ‘Shirharrá Baj.’»
«What the hell is that?»
«Roughly, a young woman soon to be ready for conception but who will never bring a child into this world.»
«Certainly macabre, yet quite understandable, I suppose.»
«The mountain legends talk of a child-woman who led the other village children out of the hills, avoiding scores of patrols, who even killed soldiers with their own bayonets by luring them into traps all by herself.»
«A girl of ten … it’s incredible!» Geoffrey Cooke frowned. «You said there were two things more. What’s the other?»
«The last piece of evidence that for us confirmed her identity. Among the buried records were family histories—certain more isolated branches of the Basques live in fear of inbreeding, which is why so many young men and women are sent away. At any rate, there was the family ‘Aquirre, first child a female baptized Amaya,’ a common name. The surname Aquirre was scratched out—furiously scratched out as if by an angry child, the name Bajaratt replacing it.»