I didn’t want to stay on the phone too long because that group down there could split up at any minute and I’d need to keep track of them as long as I could.

  ‘Yes,’ I heard Ferris saying. ‘We want you to get the objective for us as soon as you can do it safely.’

  The girl,’ I said.

  He didn’t answer right away. I could hear something like static from his end: he was probably in the wireless room at the consulate, and not at the Hotel Amazonas. Conceivably he was getting stuff direct from Control while he had me on the line. I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to ask because if he wanted me to know then he’d tell me.

  ‘No,’ he said in a moment, ‘not the girl. We want the whole group.’

  In a couple of seconds I said:

  ‘You want the whole of the Kobra cell.’

  There are always a lot of repeats when a major directive is being put on the line, especially when it’s being done on the phone. It’s not a time for mistakes.

  The whole cell,’ Ferris said, ‘yes.’

  Another mosquito was whining faintly near my head, but I didn’t think, for the moment, about swatting it ‘Alive?’ I asked Ferris.

  He answered straight away because he’d expected the question and had already got a directive on it.

  ‘That’s immaterial. But if you can get the girl out, everyone would appreciate it,’

  Chapter Thirteen: SHADIA

  The damned creature was twenty feet long, can you imagine?’

  Van de Jong broke some bread.

  ‘Who came out of it?’ I asked him.

  He’d come to join me for dinner at my table and it suited my book: he was a compulsive talker so I didn’t have to listen, and he provided good cover. The solitary image is always suspect They both came out of it, of course! He does it for the tourists, when there are any. Listen to me - the anaconda does not crush its victim. It merely throttles it. So all this fellow does is to keep the coils away from his throat. In any case, man is not its habitual prey, so it is just confused when a man comes to wrestle with it, you see.’ He gave a laugh, showing a gold tooth. ‘But it is fun to watch. You should see it I will take you tomorrow.’

  The Kobra cell was across the room: the five men and the woman they called Shadia. The Burdick girl was sitting in the corner with someone on each side of her. They were eating, but seemed more to be waiting.

  The Indian boy came to our table again.

  ‘Voce precisa alguma coisa?’

  ‘Nada. Tudo esta bem.’

  We were eating paiche with farinha and de Jong was on his third rum punch: he had so far made three jokes about the ulcer I was using as an excuse for not drinking.

  The Burdick girl looked pale in the light of the oil lamps. She didn’t talk very often but sometimes I could make out a few of the words. The woman was asking her about life in an American college and the answers were token and desultory:

  ‘It’s okay, I guess,’ and ‘you can get into a whole lot of subjects,’ mat kind of thing. The Kobra policy was consistent: it was public knowledge mat Pat Burdick was on an expedition in Brazil with selected companions, and she could even be seen there if anyone were interested. The conversation I had so far overheard was about the Amazon, insects, and American college life: all subjects appropriate to the cover. The party wasn’t keeping to its quarters upstairs, but was eating openly in public, and I assumed that if anyone went over to the table in the corner and said excuse me but aren’t you Pat Burdick she would say yes, I am.

  I didn’t intend to do that.

  ‘It is different with those damned piranhas, my friend. Have you seen them at work?’

  I said I hadn’t.

  It had taken me a long time to analyse the data inherent in the directive Ferris had given me. London doesn’t tell you more than you need to know for your health but it can’t stop you forming your own conclusions.

  They are not so big,’ said de Jong, ‘but when they are in a feeding frenzy they can pick a hundred-pound animal down to the bones, can you imagine?’ He speared his fish steak with his fork. ‘Of course, I suppose we avenge ourselves!’ His laughter was attracting some attention among the group of animal trappers near the bar, and someone laughed in response. He seemed to like this, and raised his glass of rum.

  The big ceiling fans stirred the air above our heads, and sent the fly-papers twisting. The nights were cooler here: the thermometer by the desk was down to 97° and they’d thrown open the double doors to let the air in through the mosquito screens.

  Conclusion 1: Since Ferris had instructed me to knock out the Kobra cell, termination being optional, it was obvious that any physical threat to the Secretary of Defense could be dealt with. Pat Burdick must have been told mat if she tried to escape or call the police her father would be killed and in most hostage situations the captor means what he says. But if I could knock out Kobra it would amount to outside intervention even though the girl hadn’t asked for it, and the Bureau must be covering the Defense Secretary in some way.

  Conclusion 2: This meant that I could in fact get a message to the girl, to the effect that if she could escape, her father would be safe. But there was a risk and London hadn’t told me to do that. Ignore.

  Conclusion 3: The Defense Secretary was in constant touch with London and would know that London had someone penetrating the Kobra operation and had obviously asked for his daughter’s life to be spared if that were possible. But I believed that even if the Defense Secretary were not involved, the Bureau might have set up the Kobra mission in any case.

  Corollary to Conclusion 3: Regardless of the Burdick involvement, London wanted Kobra and they wanted Kobra with that brand of calculated desperation that would keep a human computer like Egerton at the signals console in Whitehall till he dropped dead of fatigue, the brand of desperation that had knocked out one agent after another in Milan and Geneva and Cambodia and New York in order to leave one man alive in the end-phase to do the job.

  That is why my mail order business is successful, you see.’ De Jong slit open a papaya with his knife. ‘I give them the real thing, and they know it. The jewellery is crude but it is genuine. Look at this!’

  He began throwing small objects on to the woven cloth.

  I heard the telephone at the desk begin ringing.

  ‘Dyed bones and teeth, fish scales, caiman scales, seed pods, stones. Aren’t they attractive? Wouldn’t you be tempted to buy this kind of thing if you saw examples in your own mail box?’

  Said I would.

  I had looked across at the woman several times during the past half an hour and she had twice found my eyes on her. She was young and sexually aware and would expect the distant attention of any man in the room and I was duly giving her mine. The second time she didn’t look away and I’d finally turned my head to hear what de Jong was saying.

  ‘I suppose you know what this is? It’s a blowgun dart. And I suppose you know what they put on the tip when they mean to kill. Every schoolboy knows.’ He pushed the pointed sliver of bone across the cloth towards me.

  The telephone had stopped ringing.

  ‘Curare,’ said de Jong. ‘Of course when I sell these things through the mail there is nothing on their tips - I need live clients, not dead ones!’ He laughed loudly and got an echo from the group of steadily-drinking trappers near the bar.

  One of the boys was on his way across to the table in the corner.

  ‘You know something? The CIA is in trouble right now for stocking these gadgets, can you imagine? But they use sodium cyanide. You know what they call the gun? A “nondiscernible microbionoculator”. Where is progress, my friend?’ He raised his glass of rum.

  Zade and Kuznetski were leaving the corner table and taking Pat Burdick with mem to the lobby, the boy leading the way. It looked pre-arranged. The three others remained at the table with Shadia. I would have given a lot to follow them out after thirty seconds’ interval but that would be fatal.

  There was a brief exchange of voices in the lobby and then I beard footsteps on the stairs, hurrying. They were taking the call in one of their rooms. My watch read 21:17 but that didn’t mean the call hadn’t been arranged to be made precisely on the hour: in a remote village on the Amazon a delay of seventeen minutes would be routine.

  In Pat Burdick’s frightened eyes there had been the light of hope as she had passed our table. She might not know the terms of the deal but in any case they wouldn’t mean anything to her because she was young and she didn’t want to die and she wouldn’t care if these people were asking an entire squadron of nuclear bombers in exchange for her life. But even if she had enough pride to tell her father he must expend her if that was the only way, she wouldn’t be allowed to say it. Zade would have rehearsed her and he’d be there beside her.

  Daddy, you must do whatever they tell you, Van der Jong pushed another artifact across the table.

  ‘Now look at this. Isn’t it charming?’

  Nobody else had left the dining-room.

  Ventura, Ramirez and Sassine were looking casually around them, their glances passing across our table and moving on. Shadia sat watching me, perfectly still.

  ‘I get them from the garimpeiros, when they come down from the goldfields across the Xingu River. I don’t know i where they get them, but I would say it was from the prostitutes up there. Don’t you think this one is charming?’

  I looked down at it, away from Shadia’s light blue gaze.

  It looked like some kind of nutshell, with apertures carved I into it, after the fashion of Chinese trinkets. It appeared to be I filed with coarse, springy hair.

  Daddy, they won’t hurt me until midnight. Then they say they’re going to start hurting me. Can’t you do something?

  ‘Of course I don’t sell these to my regular clients.’

  He gave a confidential laugh, showing his gold tooth, Shadia watched me.

  I looked down again.

  The shell was painted gaudily on the outside, in bright childish colours.

  ‘There was quite a demand in Copenhagen, until they got bored with them. Now I sell through the adult bookstores, in Canada.’

  Will you still love me. Daddy, please do what they tell you… Please.

  Question: what would James Burdick not be prepared to do?

  ‘It’s amusing,’ I nodded to de Jong.

  ‘One thing I guarantee.’ He leaned towards me and the beads of sweat on his pink face gleamed in the light of the oil lamp. ‘It comes from a woman. The men are too proud of themselves!’

  I assumed that Pat Burdick was the go-between. In most cases of hostage-and-demand the captor handles the communications but in cases where he knows his business he will leave the hostage to make the appeal directly, usually over a telephone or sometimes on tape. This is logical because the demands are usually made to a man-almost always the victim’s father - and if he receives threats from another man his male aggressiveness comes into play and he considers himself challenged and will sometimes try to brave it out and urge the police to go in fighting on his behalf.

  I had sufficient respect for Satynovich Zade to believe he was handling this operation professionally.

  Daddy, they say I won’t ever see you again, In my trade we don’t take things personally or if you want to put it another way we take things about as personally as a pilot does when he drops his bombs. But when I killed Zade it would be with a sense of satisfaction.

  Take it. I give you the damned thing!’ said de Jong, He threw up his pink hands, laughing generously.

  Shadia turned her head a degree to look at him, then looked at me again. It occurred to me that the cell had been making enquiries into the guests here: there were probably fifteen or twenty in the hotel. Their first question to the staff would concern the time of arrival here of each guest. I had arrived on the same day as Zade and there’d been nothing I could do about that.

  ‘Thank you. It’s a charming souvenir.’

  I put the thing into my pocket to please him.

  There were voices upstairs suddenly, and the men near the bar stopped talking and looked at the ceiling. For a moment the whole dining-room was quiet, then people began talking again. In five minutes Zade and Kuznetski came down again with the girl and crossed over to their table. She had been crying, but was making an effort to appear normal, and I don’t think anyone would have noticed it unless they’d been watching her closely.

  Flat white light came against the windows and a few people turned their heads and looked away again. In a moment distant thunder rolled.

  ‘Have you been here when there is a storm?’ asked de Jong.

  ‘Yes.’

  He wiped his pink face dry.

  ‘I tell you something. This is the most poisonous climate in the entire world, it has the most poisonous insects and the most poisonous reptiles. But people come here. I come, and you come.’ He drained his glass. ‘This place has something, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Something for everyone,’

  The rain roared incessantly on the roof.

  Light flared white in the room through the slats in the shutters, silvering her body for an instant. She said something but it was lost in the drumming of the thunder overhead. The building shook.

  Then there was the warm light of the oil lamp again, glowing on her tawny skin and the mass1 of body hair as she writhed on the bed with her long legs, reminding me in colouring of a tiger lily because she was heavily freckled, reminding me too of Marianne, of the Villa Madeleine, because they both wanted the light on, and everything to be slow.

  Shadia said something again, speaking in Polish with the Varsovie accent and laughing a little, perhaps afraid of the storm. She wanted me to put it here, and here, as she moved restlessly on the bed for me, her sweat slipping.

  ‘I like it like this,’ she said, ‘with the storm.’

  She was afraid of it. And probably of nothing else.

  I remembered her now.

  When Fogel had fired at point-blank range into the faces of the two Deuxieme Bureau men in Paris last year there’d been a woman involved, a native of Poland who had joined the new extremist group being formed in Athens. She had trained as usual in the Palestinian guerilla camps, in this case with the Japanese Red Army units. The only place in Europe where she refused to operate was Germany, and she would have nothing to do with the Baader-Meinhof group.

  She was typical: restless the whole time and never stopping to enjoy a new sensation before we went on to the next. Nothing could satisfy her because she couldn’t wait, couldn’t give it time. I’d known these women before: they’re afraid of letting go, and in the end the male streak in them sends them out into the streets with grenades to prove their point that they can’t love and so they’re going to hate.

  She spoke in English sometimes against the drumming of the storm.

  ‘Oh my God, darling.’

  Nothing that meant anything.

  Fierce light and almost immediate vibration as the thunder v banged.

  These were the more dangerous moments: when I couldn’t hear anything but the storm. At these moments I watched the door.

  She had been wandering in the courtyard, around midnight, knowing I would see her because I had to pass that way to my room. Van de Jong had been trying to talk me into becoming a part-time representative in his mail order business because I travelled quite a lot and seemed interested; it was excellent cover because his voice carried, and we had talked till twelve.

  ‘Now,’ she said in Polish, ‘this time now.‘But of course it didn’t work.

  The force of the rain rattled the tiles overhead. The hotel was perfectly square, its four sides surrounding the courtyard; and the Spanish tiles sloped at a low angle, sending the flood of water into the guttering and forming cascades through the gaps where it had broken.

  ‘Slowly,’ she said, out of breath.

  But her long hands were still restless and unsatisfied. Later she’d find more release in the orgasmic flash of a grenade.

  The thunder came and I watched the door again.

  Because this was a Venus trap.

  ‘Oh darling,’ she said in English, ‘oh my God.’

  The door was locked but there wasn’t a bolt.

  They might have a key but it wasn’t material: they would need approximately the same amount of time to open the door with a key as to smash it inwards. I had estimated from three to four seconds for them to reach me from the passage outside, including the opening of the door. That was long enough but only if I stayed alert.

  Her thighs twisted again under me.

  ‘Where was this?’ I asked her.

  In the glow from the oil lamp the tattooed number showed blue on her skin.

  ‘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.