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.

  ‘1 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.

  I turned and lay on my back, cupping my hands backwards in front of my ears and resting my elbows. By 02:13 I’d picked up and put together a dozen phrases, mostly in Polish and probably spoken by Zade and Kuznetski; and it was clear that some kind of crisis had arisen and the inference was that it concerned Pat Burdick’s fever.

  At 02:13 a Volkswagen arrived outside the front of the hotel and I heard the doctor being shown to the room below the part of the roof where I was lying. He began speaking in Portuguese but had to switch to English when they didn’t understand.

  Various routine questions, some of which I heard distinctly because he spoke slowly for them: how long had the young lady been in Brazil, were there any symptoms of fever, aching of the bones, vomiting, before arriving in this country, so forth.

  He stayed for twenty-five minutes and soon after he left I could hear Zade’s voice speaking into a telephone: he became angry and lapsed once or twice into Polish; then I thought I could hear the fainter voice of the Burdick girl, answering rapid questions. From a sharp word here and there in Polish I understood that a call had been made, or was to be made, to Washington DC. By the tone of the voices there was some degree of dissension about this.

  I went on listening.

  Above me the stars were enormous in a clearing sky, and to the south the moon drifted in layers of light cloud, sending pale illumination along the the rooftops. Not far to my left I could make out a black squat form jutting upwards: this was the habitual roosting place of the buzzard and it was prepared to accept my presence so long as I didn’t go too close again.

  More voices from below, several together: a heated discussion concerning ‘schedules’, ‘hospital’, ‘charter service’, ‘nursing’, and various other less informative words. Manaus was mentioned two or three times, and Washington once.

  Then a new phase began: the voices almost died away and there were the muffled bangs of doors and the click of catches. A tap was run for a few seconds and then shut off. A cistern was flushed. The general impression was of haste and I began crawling across the humped tiles to the far corner, where the vines ran from the roof to the communal balcony below.

  There was no direct access to either of the windows of my room and I had to walk along a dozen yards of the exposed balcony but they were too busy over there to mount any kind of lookout. The hair was still intact across the join of the door and the post, and I went inside with only a token degree of caution because no one could have got in through either window without my hearing them from the roof. I closed the door but left it unlocked because I believed the Kobra cell was professional, or at least composed of professional individuals, and there were some gaps in their thinking that worried me.

  There were still a few things in the suitcase I’d bought in Belem and I distributed them on the chair and the dressing table and left the case on the stand with the lid open, because they’d sent Shadia to check me out and that meant I was suspect and if I were suspect they ought not to leave the hotel without making sure where I was. The bed had only a sheet on it but I rolled up one of the Indian rugs and made a forty-five degree kink in it and put it under the sheet, bunching the pillow and pulling down the mosquito net to cover the bed.

  This was routine and my movements were directed mostly by habit; reinforced by experience and training: to leave this room without attending to these details would be like driving a car through a surveillance zone without checking the mirror.

  The bathroom looked acceptable and there was nothing missing; the shaver would be in deep shadow if the light were put on in the bedroom so I moved it six inches: a shaver is the last thing in the bathroom a man forgets because it’s a lot more expensive than the toothbrush and the other things.

  One of the taps was dripping and I left it like that because false impressions are furnished with small details designed to misinform the enquirer at the subliminal level and at that level the sound of a dripping tap is a sign of occupancy.

  I stopped to listen. None of the doors on the other side of the courtyard had opened yet: I would have heard them through the bathroom ventilator. I could hear two voices, one of them carrying more than the other, though both men were trying to speak quietly. Zade and Kuznetski.

  Theory: Kobra had been waiting for the Secretary of Defense to agree to their terms and arrange the rendezvous for the exchange: Pat Burdick, safe and unharmed, for whatever commodity or facility was demanded. It was unlikely that they would ask James Burdick to come to Brazil, even on the pretext of visiting his daughter during her expedition, because his duties were exacting, and knowledgeable people would be surprised at his sudden absence. Possibly Burdick had been putting up some degree of resistance but had now broken because he believed his daughter to be ill, and the exchange had been agreed on: it was to take place as soon as possible and in the United States, possibly in or near an isolation hospital with tropical medicine facilities, Theory, not assumption.

  Assumptions are dangerous.

  I had assumed for instance that when one of the doors was opened on the other side of the courtyard I would catch the sound through the bathroom ventilator, but as I turned to go back into the bedroom I saw the crack of light widening across the floorboards.

  I stopped.

  The movement of the latch had made no sound: they had taken great care with it. I didn’t know if they’d taken the second key from the board in the hall and had been prepared to use it, but that made no difference: I’d left the door unlocked because the gaps in their thinking had worried me and I had wanted to make it easy for them to check on my whereabouts.

  The crack of light became a band, tapering from the door towards the bed; it was thrown partly by the lamps outside and partly by the moon. The shadow of the intruder was slowly taking shape as the door was inched wider by infinite degrees.

  Tidal breathing, the lungs filled, The drip of the tap.

  If they turned to look in the direction of this sound, simply because it was a sound and possessed associations, they would look straight into my face.

  Consider immediate action.

  Wait Because they were not yet inside the room and couldn’t at the moment see me and when they had come far enough to see me they would experience a half-second of shock and would require another half-second in which to react and that would give me time to move.

  Without turning my head I looked at the mirror on the dressing table and saw that it formed a blind angle from here to the door: all I could see was the diaphanous whiteness of the mosquito net covering the bed. The shadow forming across the floor was distorted by the angle of contact and it was recognizable only as that of a human being. The door was not yet open more than five or six inches but I noted that the left hand was on the handle.

  None of the Kobra cell were left-handed.

  Inference: weapon.

  The incoming data was increasing rapidly as the light from the balcony flooded softly across the mosquito net, reflecting a diffused radiance. The shadow was taking on form.

  The scent of huile de citron.

  Shadia.

  She used it against the mosquitoes and its lemon sharpness had been on her skin when I was in her room earlier.

  The door was now open ten or twelve inches and stopped moving.

  Wait But consider taking Shadia hostage and trying for a stalemate. It was possible, practicable, and dangerous. But it was not less possible man other moves, and not more dangerous. I think it was the opportunity that looked so attractive so I decided against it I listened to her breathing.

  The air was perfectly still and she was controlling each breath, but I heard it, and heard the excitement in it. Her shadow was moving, a short linear form bringing in a new component. It was some kind of gun and the muzzle was highlighted by the diffused glow in the room: I. would have said it carried a silencer.

  This would be the moment.

  Later could be too late.

  If she saw me now I would have the use of that one final second because her gun hand was against the door and she’d have to move the whole of her body through a right angle before she could take aim and fire. If she moved extremely fast I could finish up running into the first shot at zero range but the risk was calculated and I decided to accept it and began relaxing the leg muscles to whip up the circulation prior to tension.

  Empty the lungs slowly. Refill.

  Somewhere in the moist air a mosquito whined thinly and we both heard it. She believed that only she heard it. She was keeping absolutely still.

  I watched the muzzle of the gun steadily: that was the sole focus of danger and I mustn’t let it out of my sight even when I hurled my body against it.

  She was within a few feet of where I stood and I could smell the recently-known scent of her body, subtler than the sharpness of the lemon oil.

  Final review of situation: she hadn’t come here to stand in the doorway and leave again without searching the room and when she began searching the room she would see me and shoot to kill. She was waiting only to make sure that the figure under the mosquito net was still sleeping and in a few seconds now she would move fully into the room.

  Findings: it was logical to take her now.

  Various sensory data presented itself: my right foot was within an inch of the bathroom doorpost and I would use that to initiate the spring; the muzzle of the gun was approximately waist high and I would go for it with the right hand while the left hand dragged at the door to expose her to the subsequent phases of the attack; the diffused light was sufficient to bring me accurately on to the primary target (the muzzle of the gun), and the brighter illumination from the balcony would give me all I needed to make the necessary movements once the gun was controlled.

  Peripheral considerations: she might have time to cry out and for that reason I should make the secondary target her throat; she might drop the gun if I didn’t control it before her fingers came open in shock; one or more of the Kobra might come on to the balcony across the courtyard before I could gain conclusive dominance, and I should therefore go in very fast indeed to the primary and secondary targets and use the remaining momentum to pull her bodily away from the door.

  In the last few microseconds before any physical action the mind enacts it first, leaving the blueprint for the nervous system to follow. This was happening now but I wasn’t conscious of it. Consciously I was tensing the diaphragm, blocking the breath and bracing the right foot against the doorpost But she began shooting before I could move.

  Chapter Fourteen: MANTIS

  In extreme danger the senses are very alert and I could hear the whine of the mosquito loudening, either because it was coming closer to my face or because the muffled explosion of the first shot had left the eardrum desensitized and hearing was now coming back, Phutt.