Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (20 page)

“Then they take the surfboards close into the California coast on the yacht. They weight and dead-drop them under the ocean either on the bottom or on a line. Then their surfers go down in scuba gear, pick up the boards, dead-drop their tanks, surf into shore at Malibu and drive off with the surfboards full of explosives in their camper vans.”

_p. 221
There was total silence.

“Hmm, splendid piece of lateral thinking,” said Widgett. “Based on . . .?”

“I saw them practicing in Honduras. I swam round the headland in Popayan and saw them dead-dropping the boards, then surfing in.”

“Wasn’t that what you were supposed to be looking for, Rich?” said Widgett. “Or were you too busy getting her Burgundy out of your electronic bug? Puligny-Montrachet, wasn’t it?”

“Shut up, please, sir.”

“So you put a bug in Feramo’s potted fig tree?” said Olivia.

“And his cactus. And your cactus, come to mention it.”

“And you put a sweater over one, a glass of Cristal in the other, and a white burgundy in the third. Louis Jadot ’ninety-six, wasn’t it?” said Widgett.

“ ’Ninety-five,” said Olivia.

“Must have hurt, pouring it away.”

“It did,” said Olivia.

“Karl, hey.” Scott was talking into his phone. “Get the H section checking surfers on the SoCal coast, will you? Focus on the Malibu Lagoon break. Check the boards for C4 inside. And get some people onto Catalina—undercover—checking out the boat docks. Where was this place, Olivia? Olivia? Feramo’s place on Catalina?”

“Oh, er. It was right of Avalon.”

“
Right
?”

“East. North, maybe; you know, right when you’re facing Catalina from LA. It’s round the corner on the seaward side, towards Hawaii.”

“Right, right,” said Scott Rich. “Round the corner towards Hawaii.” He sighed. “Just check all the landing stages,” he said into the phone.

“Jolly good. Well, that’s all sorted then,” said Widgett. “Now what about the target? Any thoughts?”

_p. 222
She told them about her theories, about the face cream with ricin in, the acetylene bubbles in the cooling pipes of the nuclear power stations, the attacks on the studios.

“But it’s too broad,” she said. “I need to spend more time with Feramo to narrow it down.”

“The perfect thing would be to take him up on this Sudan offer,” said Widgett. “It would be fascinating under any circumstances.”

“He’d be crazy to bring you out there,” said Scott.

“He
is
crazy,” said Olivia.

“He’s crazy to have let you go,” said Scott.

“Thank you,” said Olivia, thinking maybe Scott Rich wasn’t so bad after all.

“I meant because it was obvious you’d turn him in. As you have.”

“He trusts me. He thinks I’m his falcon.”

Scott let out an odd noise.

“Is something the matter, Scott, Rich, Morton, or whatever your name is?”

“Yes, Rachel, or Olivia, or Pixie, or whatever the fuck yours is today . . .”

“Oh God in heaven,” drawled Widgett, taking out a handkerchief and wiping his forehead. “It is rather the form for spooks to assume multiple identities. I mean some of us spent two full seasons as a drag queen at the Aswan Cataract Hotel.”

“
Spooks,
yes,” said Scott Rich.

“Which is what makes Ms. Joules so interesting,” said Widgett. “She’s a natural spy. Now the question is, if
Pierre Feramo
”—he said the name with an exaggerated French accent—“telephones you as promised and beckons you to his Bedouin
lair
in the Red Sea hills, would you go?”

“Yup,” said Olivia solemnly.

“Would you?” said Scott Rich, fixing her with his intense gray eyes. “Even if his only motive was to kill you?”

“If he wanted to kill me, he would have killed me in Honduras.”

_p. 223
“Oh, absolutely,” said Widgett. “A fellow could have a lot of perfectly good reasons for wanting to whisk Agent Joules off to the desert. Surely you’ve read
The Arabian Nights,
Rich? Profoundly erotic book. A girl swept away by a Bedouin could look forward to some most imaginative nights in his tent, I would wager.”

“And then what?” said Scott Rich, striding angrily ahead.

_p. 224
I
t was five days since Olivia had left Feramo in the Bay Islands and he hadn’t called. The team, which now, unfortunately, seemed to include Suraya the Undercover Bitch, had been holed up in a basement room since breakfast. Through some complex electronic maneuver, Scott Rich had routed the wrong number Olivia gave to Feramo through to the Tech Op Room so that, if Feramo rang, it would come to them direct.

The clock in the Operations Room was of the functional plastic type that Olivia remembered from school: a white face, black numbers and a red second hand. It was 4:00
P.M.,
9:00
A.M.
in Honduras on the fifth morning since—with a badly sucked finger—she had taken her leave of Feramo.

Scott Rich, Professor Widgett, Olivia, Dodd the tech op and Suraya were all, with varying degrees of subtlety or ostentation, glancing at the clock in turn and—in Olivia’s mind—all thinking the same thing:
She’s made it up. He wasn’t interested in her at all. He’s not going to call.

“Rich, my dear fellow. Are you absolutely sure you got that number wired up properly?” said Widgett, picking at a morsel of foie gras and toast he had had sent up. “You seemed to be pressing an awful lot of buttons.”

“Yes,” said Scott Rich without looking up from the computer.

“He’s not going to call, is he?” said Suraya.

“You should call him, Olivia,” said Scott Rich.

_p. 225
“It will put him off,” Olivia insisted. “He has to pursue.”

“I thought you were his falcon,” said Scott Rich, a twinkle in the clever eyes. “Or was it a budgie?”

He turned away and started talking to the technician, both of them focusing intently on the screen. One half showed Olivia’s stolen shots of Feramo. The other was a slide show of known al-Qaeda terrorists. From time to time, they would stop and merge the shots to produce Feramo in a turban with a Kalashnikov, Feramo in a checked shirt in a bar in Hamburg, Feramo with a different nose, Feramo in a nightshirt with his hair standing on end.

“Actually, I agree with Scott,” said Suraya, putting her long jean-clad legs up on the desk.

“If he doesn’t call, then there’s no point in my calling him because it means he has lost interest.”

“Honestly,” laughed Suraya, “this isn’t
Blind Date.
You’re just being insecure. He really likes you. Pierre prefers a strong woman. She should definitely call him.”

Scott Rich leaned forward, elbows on his knees, chin resting on his thumbs, and looked at Widgett with the same intense focus which had first startled Olivia in the bar in Honduras.

“So what do you think?” he said to Widgett.

Widgett scratched the back of his neck and sucked air through his teeth. “There’s an old Sudanese saying, ‘Wherever man and woman are present, the devil is the third.’ The Arab’s stereotype image of a woman is almost as an animal: highly sexed and willing to have intercourse with any man, as if that is all they think about.”

“Really?” said Scott Rich, leaning back, glancing at Olivia.

“The feeling persists even today in some quarters that a man and woman alone together will inevitably engage in sexual intercourse.”

Olivia, distractingly, found herself flashing back to the night on Bell Key: Morton C. kissing her, pressing against her, slipping his hand into her jeans. She caught his eye for a second and had the disconcerting impression that he was thinking about the same thing.

“There was a survey not long ago,” Widgett went on. “A group
_p. 226
of Sudanese Arabs were asked, ‘If you came home and found a strange man in your house, what would you do?’ The answer came back almost unanimously: ‘Kill him.’ ”

“Christ,” said Scott Rich. “Remind me not to go out there disguised as a plumber.”

“Thus the obsession, in some Arab cultures, with chastity—the veils, the burkas, the clitoridectomies. The woman is wholly eroticized: an object to be protected if she is one of your own, and pursued and conquered if she is not.”

“Okay, so if in Feramo’s eyes Olivia is an insatiable love beast anyway, why can’t she just call?” said Scott Rich. “But, wait, how does sex outside marriage work with Islam?”

“Ah! Well! This is where it gets interesting,” said Widgett. “Particularly with Feramo and all this Bedouin romanticism—wanting to sweep her onto a horse and gallop off into the desert sunset. The Bedouin ethos predates Islam. It’s fundamental to the psyche. If you look at
The Arabian Nights,
you see that that way of thought, Bedouin desert-nomad mentality, overrides morality. When a hero’s sexual conquests are the results of his courage, cunning or good luck, they are viewed not as immoral, but heroic.”

“Exactly. So he needs to break down my will and overwhelm me,” said Olivia. “He’s not exactly going to feel heroic if I phone and give him my flight number.”

Scott Rich handed her the phone. “Call him.”

“Er, so the discussion we’ve just been having was meaningless?”

“Call him. Don’t say anything about flying out there, or falcons. Just tell him you’ve got back safely and thank him for the fine wines and free hotel suite.”

“Hmm,” said Widgett, looking at Scott with cold blue eyes and chewing his toast.

“He’s not going to call her,” said Scott Rich tersely. “He’s not going to ask her out to the Sudan, and we don’t need her to go out to the Sudan. It’s ridiculous. I just need to know where he is. Call him,” he said, holding out the phone.

_p. 227
“Of course,” said Olivia sweetly. “Do I just dial?”

“No, I’ll do it for you,” he said gruffly, turning back to the lines of screens and keyboards, giving a quick, disconcerted glance over his shoulder before going off with the tech op into some electronic zone-out, pressing and checking things and exchanging knowing looks. Scott Rich, for all his cool exterior, was a closet grungy techie. She tried to imagine him with a paunch and a big yellow T-shirt with something stupid written on it, drinking real ale with his mates.

He spun round on his chair. “You ready?”

“Sure,” she said cheerily, putting the phone to her ear. “Say when!”

Buttons were pressed. The phone started ringing. Olivia felt a rising flutter of panic.

“Hello?” she said, her voice quavering.

“Hi”—a woman’s voice—“my name is Berneen Neerkin. I’m calling from MCI Worldcom. We’d like the opportunity to introduce you to our new airtime package . . .”

Telemarketers! Olivia tried to compose her features. The infallible techno-god Scott Rich had got his wires crossed. She felt a giggle-bubble rising up as she caught a glimpse of his face. She tried to think of serious things, like death or getting a really bad haircut, but nothing worked. She started to shake and couldn’t remember what position was normal for her own face.

Scott Rich got to his feet. He looked down at her very seriously, like a schoolmaster with a recalcitrant pupil. Noticing Widgett’s shoulders shaking too, he shook his head and turned back to the computer.

“I’ll just get a glass of water,” choked Olivia, beetroot-red, and she staggered out into the corridor, where she leaned against the wall, shaking with laughter, wiping her eyes. As she made her way to the bathroom, the amusingness of the whole thing kept overcoming her. It wasn’t until she’d splashed her face with water and stayed there a few minutes that she felt she had exorcised the last of the giggle-bubbles, and even then she didn’t feel entirely safe.

_p. 228
As she made her way back along the corridor, she heard raised voices coming from the Tech Op Room.

“Look, we cannot shut down the whole of the state of California. We have C4, we have ricin, we have a possible commercial diving connection. Where does that take us? California is three times as big as your small, dark, benighted land.”

“Yes, all right, all right,” came Widgett’s voice.

“Where do we start? In southern California alone we have major shipping ports in the Bay Area, Ventura, Los Angeles and San Diego. We have four nuclear-power sites and hundreds of miles of wide-bore tunnel water systems, sewage systems and drainage systems under every major city. We have aqueducts, bridges, reservoirs, dams and military bases. What do you propose we do? Evacuate the state? It’s a needle in a haystack. Our only chance is to bust this Takfiri cell wide open and find out what they’re up to. Now.”

“Listen, young man, if you bust the cell, the danger is that the plan or device, whatever and wherever it is, is already in place; they’ll know they’re rumbled and they’ll detonate early. My hunch is that you won’t get anything out of them anyway because none of them is party to the whole scheme of things. The only person who might know more is Feramo, and that’s why the powers that be got him the hell out of Honduras at the first whiff of trouble. If I were you, I’d get your people on shutting down any nonessential underwater maintenance and repair projects right away, and get your chaps down there to check out employees, commercial diving schools, anything suspicious.”

“Have you any idea of the scale of that operation? All we need to do is find Feramo. If we find him, we can see into his freakin’ laptop. We don’t need Olivia.”

“Listen, Rich, if we can work out what the bastards are up to without spending thirty million dollars reducing the whole of eastern Sudan to a pile of smoldering rubble and at the cost of one girl, we should get on with it.”

No one heard Olivia slip back into the room.
[missingperiod]

_p. 229
“Sir, she’s a civilian. This is not an ethical path.”

“She’s an agent and she’s willing to go. Sharp as a tack, that one. Going to snap her up for the Service when this is over, if . . .”

“If she’s still alive?”

Olivia gave a slight cough. Four pairs of eyes turned to stare at her. A split second later the phone rang.

“Jesus! Jesus!” Dodd the tech op started panicking, flapping around, trying to find buttons. “It’s him. It’s Feramo.”