Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (147 page)

'Wh-what are you doing?' she whispered. Her lips and
throat were so dry from fear that her voice came out a croak.

He held the needle poised in the crook of her elbow. 'Pleas
ant dreams, actress,' he said with an ugly sneer, and at that
moment, without bothering to roll up her sleeve or dab her arm with alcohol, he stabbed the needle deep into her flesh.

It stung sharply, and she let out a scream. Then she could
feel a sleepy sensation streaming into her arm and spreading outward through her body. Suddenly everything seemed to
slow down and become fuzzy. She was vaguely aware of the
car doors opening
...
of slumping forward and being tugged
outside. Her legs were too limp to support her, and the men
had to hold her up.

'I
worry about you all the time,'
Inge's voice echoed some
where in the back of her mind, and that was her last thought.
Then her expression slackened and her eyelids drooped shut.
The world blurred and went black.

Najib al-Ameer's study on the top floor of the Trump Tower
was book-lined and exceedingly luxurious.

Armless suede couches, signed tan-leather-covered French chairs, tole lamps, and a lacquered bronze-embellished desk
made by
maître
Philippe-Claude Montigny for Louis XV him
self could barely hold their own among the tortoiseshell-
finished bookcases lined in brass and the warmth of books,
books, and more books.

But there was more to this library than mere beautifully
bound books and shelves upon shelves of first editions. Huge
shallow drawers held a king's ransom of ancient Persian script
fragments, sheafs of historical documents and treaties signed
by kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers, three-
thousand-year-old Egyptian papyri, seventeen-thousand-
year-old painted rock fragments plundered from a cave in
Lascaux, France, and the world's largest private collection
of ancient maritime maps. The jewels of Najib al-Ameer's
priceless treasures were Christian: the first a Gutenberg Bible,
the second a complete illuminated manuscript of the
Book of
Hours
from the fourteenth century.

As the moment, Najib, who usually found solace, peace,
and immense joy in this, his sanctum, was finding that for once
even his precious study could not divert either his gloom or his feeling of impending doom. The instant the telephone
shrilled, he pounced on it, by habit activating the scrambler
before the caller had a chance to speak.

'
It is done,' a distorted voice told him over the rushing static
in Arabic. 'The product is in our hands.'

Najib's hand began shaking so hard that the receiver
knocked against his ear. After three decades of waiting
patiently for this moment, the reality of the situation suddenly
left him feeling stupefied: weak and depleted. For a moment
he found it difficult to speak.

'Are you there?' the voice asked after a long pause.

He pulled himself together. 'Yes, I am still here. Did every
thing go smoothly?'

'Like clockwork. Shall we deliver the product to the desti
nation agreed upon?'

'Yes,' Najib replied. 'I will be awaiting delivery.'

Slowly he lowered the receiver and let it drop back in its
cradle. Then, loath to taint his sanctum with his gloom, he
went out into the adjoining reading room and stared out the
wall of tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. The sky looked
phlegmy; it was one of those hot, muggy grey days, a preview
of the oppressive summer to come, and the grey glass only
made everything look muggier and more polluted than it really
was. For a moment his mind pictured the Mideastern desert,
so clear, so pure, so unspoiled. So clean and dry, with rippled
mountains of sandy dunes, lengthening purple shadows, and
blast-furnace heat.

Hands clasped behind his back, he paced, once again won
dering whether it was all worth it
...
or whether it wouldn't
have been better to just forget about the past and let it be.

But Abdullah wouldn't let it go, had let him know as much
in no uncertain terms.

His hands still shaking, Najib picked up the telephone
receiver and punched a number. Newark answered almost
immediately.

His voice was resigned. 'Prepare the plane for takeoff,' he
said in English. 'No, not the Lear. The 727. You'll have to file an overseas flight plan.' When he hung up, he went to get his
two briefcases, one filled with work, the other with travel
documents and more work. Everything else he might need, including a complete change of wardrobe, was on the plane.

The Bell Jet Ranger helicopter with Daliah aboard finally
received control-tower clearance and rose shakily up into the
air. It nosed swiftly higher, higher, into the bright, cloudless
blue of the sky, and then headed due east, over Samaria, then
straight south along the Jordan River to Jericho.

Trust the Israelis, Khalid was thinking with a smirk. Smuggling the actress into Jordan would be easy enough. She would
simply go over the Allenby Bridge in a truckload of fruit or
vegetables bound for Amman. Even during the Yom Kippur
War, this economic link held up; despite the fighting, West
Bank fruits and vegetables kept being trucked over.

He grinned. Those Jews would never learn.

Chapter 8

When Daliah came to, her first thought was that she was being
cremated alive. Then came the realization that she had been
trussed. She raised her head and tried to move her arms, but
that wasn't possible because her wrists had been securely tied behind her back. For a moment she struggled to free herself,
but the cleverly tied knot was out of reach, and the more she struggled, the more she caused the bond to dig into her flesh
and chafe her skin. If she continued this for much longer, she'd
succeed only in rubbing her wrists raw.

With a grunt, she let her head slump back. She closed her
eyes for a moment, trying to deal rationally with the situation.
But thoughts came sluggishly, and it was difficult to hold on
to them for long. Between the narcotic still in her system and
the debilitating heat, she felt impotent.

The heat was the worst. It was unbearable: oppressive, deadening. Her lungs burned from it and her skin prickled
with a heat rash; it was so hot that it was impossible for her to
take one really full, deep breath. All she was capable of were
short, shallow gasps of stifling air, and the lack of a refreshing
lungful brought on the beginnings of galloping panic.

She fought to regain control of herself. Giving in to panic,
she warned herself, would only make everything that much
worse. She knew she should be grateful for just being alive.

Then she became aware of her thirst. It was a thirst without
dimension. There didn't seem to be an ounce of moisture anywhere in her body; every square inch of her flesh felt
squeezed dry and hydrogenized.
I've been freeze-dried!
She opened her mouth to laugh like a lunatic, but her throat was
so dry not a sound could be voiced.

She knew then that unless she got hold of herself she was
going to go certifiably mad. Slowly a burgeoning anger rose
within her and kept the impending madness at bay. It was still
within sight, still temptingly close but for the time being she'd
managed to shove it away.

I
have to keep my anger fed. Only that way can I stoke my
will to live, and hope to survive. Think, dammit. Think!

She raised her head again, this time taking stock of her
surroundings. She had been lying on her side, and the hard
ground beneath her was spread with a heavy, scratchy, dirt-encrusted black goat-hair cloth. Grit was everywhere. Sandy
grit. She could feel it in her nose, taste its crunch in her mouth.
She could feel it, scratchy and abrasive, beneath her.

She was alone inside a stuffy black tent. A mere cloth
prison, but an effective one. She also realized that she was
stark naked. Well, there was nothing she could do about that.
If they had done that to humiliate her, then they had another
think coming. She almost had to smile. Here they had miscal
culated. She found nothing humiliating about being nude. She
had been raised to be proud of her body, and whether it was
sunbathing nude on the beaches of St. Tropez or being filmed
in the nude for all the world to see, she found it natural and
was not in the least bit inhibited.

Another tiny victory won.
But her satisfaction was short-
lived, for gradually she became aware of her heartbeat. It
seemed to be getting louder and louder all the time, until it
throbbed so noisily she became frightened. Then she under
stood. It was the silence—the kind of intense, awesome silence
one can find only in the middle of the desert at high noon. A
silence so powerful and penetrating, so all-enveloping, that it
was like an awesome physical presence.

She had been dumped in the middle of nowhere and left to
die!

A new thought flashed out of nowhere:
Where there was a
tent, there had to be people! Perhaps if she called for help
. . .

She swallowed several times to lubricate her throat, and
then she began to yell for help. She yelled 'Help' in English
and Hebrew and Arabic so often and so loud that her ears
began to ring with her cries. Even after she fell quiet, she had
the sensation that the air still echoed with her voice.

She held her breath and listened carefully above the
thump-
thump
. . .
thump-thump
of her heartbeat for a response. But there was none, and her hope evaporated as swiftly as the
moisture had seeped from her body. She'd succeeded only in
straining her vocal cords and working herself up to an even
greater thirst.