Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (207 page)

"My fine little communist lady,"" he mocked me. "Yes, Peter, it was I who was deceived, he had known from the beginning who I was. He also knew about the school at Odessa. He had accepted me as a challenge, certainly he loved me or his version of love, but he took me knowingly and corrupted my pure ideological convictions. Only then did I learn that all the information which I had been able to pass to
Moscow had been carefully screened by Aaron.

He doubled me, as I had been sent to double him. He was Mossad,
but of course you know that. He was a Zionist, you know that also.

And he made me realize that I was a Jewess, and what it meant to be that. He showed me every fatal flaw in the doctrine of Universal
Communism, he convinced me of democracy and the Western Capitalist system and then he recruited me to Mossad-" She stopped again, and shook her head vehemently.

To believe that I could have wished to destroy such a one. That I
could have ordered his abduction and mutilation Towards the end, when he was getting weak, when the pain was very bad, that was the closest
I
ever came to loving him, the way a mother loves a child. He became pathetically dependent upon me; he used to say the only thing that could lull the pain was my touch. I used to sit for hours rubbing that hairy belly feeling that awful thing growing bigger inside him each day, like a cauliflower or a grotesque foetus. He would not let them cut it. He hated them, "butchers" he called them. "Butchers with their knives and rubber tubes "" She broke off and Peter realized that her eyes were filled with tears. He hugged her a little more firmly and waited for her to recover.

"It must have been about this time that Caliph made contact with
Aaron. Thinking back I can remember the time when he became suddenly terribly agitated. It made little sense to me then, but he held long diatribes about right-wing tyranny being indistinguishable from tyranny of the left. He never mentioned the name Caliph, I do not think Caliph had yet used that name and I do believe that Aaron would eventually have told me of the contact if he had lived. It was -the way he was,
even with in detail, me, he could be as wary and subtle as he could be overpowering. He would have told me of Caliph but Caliph saw to it that he did not." She pulled away from Peter's arms so she could again see his face.

"You must understand, cheri, that much of this I have learned only recently in the last few weeks. Much of it I can only piece together like a jig puzzle pardon, a jig-saw puzzle." She corrected herself swiftly. "But this is what must have happened. Caliph contacted Aaron with a proposition.

It was a very simple proposition. He was invited to become a partner of Caliph. Aaron was to make a substantial financial contribution to Caliph's war-chest, and to place his privileged knowledge and lines of influence at Caliph's disposal. In return he would have a hand in engineering Caliph's brave new world. It was a miscalculation On Caliph's part, perhaps the only mistake he has made up to now. He had misjudged Aaron Altmann. Aaron turned him down flat but much more dangerously Caliph had made the mistake of revealing his identity to Aaron. I expect that he had to do that in an effort to convince Aaron. You see, Aaron was not a man who would indulge in a game of code names and hidden identities. That much Caliph had divined correctly. So he had to confront Aaron face to face, and when he discovered that Aaron would not join in a campaign of murder and extortion no matter how laudable the ultimate ends Caliph had no choice. He took Aaron, killed him after torturing him hideously for information that could have been useful, mainly information about his
Mossad connection I imagine. Then he persuaded me to pay the ransom. He won two major tricks with a single card.

He silenced Aaron, and he gained the twenty-five million for his war-chest."

"How did you learn this? If only you had explained to me before " Peter heard the bitterness in his own voice.

"I did not know it when we first met, please believe me. I
will tell you how I learned it, but please be patient with me. Let me tell it as it happened."

"I am sorry, "he said simply.

"The first time I heard the name "Caliph" was the day I delivered the ransom. I told you about that, didn't I?"

"Yes."

"So we come now to your part. I heard of you for the first time with the Johannesburg me hunt down Caliph. I found out about you, Peter. I was even able to have a computer printout on you-" She paused, and there was that mischievous flash in her eye again. "- I will admit to being very impressed with the formidable list of your ladies." Peter held up both hands in a gesture of surrender.

"Never again," he pleaded. "Not another word agreed?"

"Agreed."

She laughed, and then, "I'm hungry, and my throat is sore again with all this talking." They crossed the island again, with their bare feet baking on the sun-heated sand, and went back on board the Chris, craft.

The chef had stocked the refrigerator with a cornucopia of food,
and Peter opened a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne.

"You've got expensive tastes," he observed. "I don't know if I
can afford to keep you on my salary."

"I'm sure we could arrange a raise from your boss," she assured him with the twinkle in her eyes.

In tacit agreement they did not mention Caliph again until they had eaten.

There is one other thing you must understand, Peter.
I am of Mossad, but I do not control them. They control me. It was the same with Aaron. Both of us were and are very valuable agents,
possibly amongst the most valuable of all their networks, but I do not make decisions, nor am I able to have access to all their secrets.

"Mossad's single-minded goal is the safety and security of the state of Israel. It has no other reason for existence. I was certain that Aaron had made a full report to Mossad of Caliph's identity,
that he had detailed the proposition that Caliph had proposed and I
suspect that Mossad had ordered Aaron to co-operate with Caliph-"

"Why?" Peter demanded sharply.

"I do not know for certain but I can think of two reasons.

Caliph must have been such a powerful and influential man that his support would have been valuable.

Then again I suspect that Caliph had pro-Israeli leanings, or professed to have those leanings. Mossad finds allies where it can,
and does not question their morals. I think they ordered Aaron to co-operate with Caliph but-"

"But?" Peter prompted her.

"But you do not order a man like Aaron to go against his deepest convictions, and under that forbidding exterior Aaron Altmann was a man of great humanity. I think that the reason for his agitation was the conflict of duty and belief that he was forced to endure. His instinct warned him to destroy Caliph, and his duty-" She shrugged, and picked up her fluted champagne glass, twisting it between those long slim fingers and studying the pinpricks of bubbles as they rose slowly through the pale golden wine. When she spoke again she had changed direction disconcertingly.

"A thousand times I had tried to discover what was so different between you and me than with the other men I have known. Why none of them could move me and yet with you it was almost instantaneous--"

She looked up at him again as though she was still seeking the reason.

Of course, I knew so much about you. You had the qualities I admire in another human being, so I was disposed favourably but there are other qualities you cannot detail on a computer printout nor capture in a photograph. There was something about you that made me " She made a helpless gesture as she searched for the word. You made me tingle."

"That's a good word, Peter smiled.

"And I had never tingled before. So I had to be very sure.

It was a new experience to want a man merely because he is gentle and strong and-" she chuckled, " just plain sexy.

You are sexy, you know that, Peter, but also you are something else-" She broke off. "No, I am not going to flatter you any more. I
do not want you to get swollen ankles-" mixing the French idiom quaintly with the English, and this time not correcting herself. She went straight on. "Caliph must have realized that I had recruited a dangerous ally. He made the attempt to kill you that night on the
Rambouillet road-"

"They were after you," Peter cut in.

"Who, Peter? Who was after me?"

"The Russians by that time they knew you were a double agent."

"Yes, they knew-" She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. "I had thought about it, of course, and there had been two previous attempts on me, but I do not think the attempt on the Rambouillet road was Russian."

"All right, Caliph then, but after you not me," Peter suggested.

"Perhaps, but again I do not think so. My instinct tells me they had the right target. They were after you."

"I would have to agree,"

Peter said. "I think I was followed when I left Paris that evening-"
and he told her about the Citroen. I think they knew that I was alone in the Maserati."

"Then we accept it was Caliph,"she stated flatly.

Or Mossad, Peter murmured, and her eyes slowly widened, turning a darker thoughtful green as Peter went on.

"What if Mossad did not want an Atlas man getting close to their star agent, they didn't want you to have an ally in your hunt for

Caliph? What if they just didn't want me cluttering up the carefully rehearsed scenario?"

"Peter, it's very deep water-" and there are packs of sharks."

"Let's leave that night on the Rambouillet road for the moment," she suggested. "It merely complicates the story I am trying to tell you."

"All right," Peter agreed. "We can come back to it, if we have to."

"The next significant move was the abduction of
Melissa-Jane," she said, and Peter's expression changed, becoming flat and stony.

"The choice of the victim was genius-inspired," she said.

"But it required no special knowledge of you or your domestic arrangements. There was no secret that you had an only child, and it needed but a casual appraisal of your character to understand how powerful a lever she could be.

Magda dipped the tip of her finger into the champagne and then sucked it thoughtfully, pursing her lips and frowning slightly.

"You must understand that by this time I had faced the fact that I
was in love with you. The gift was supposed to affirm that-" She flushed slightly under her honey tan, and it was appealing and child-like. He had never seen her blush before and it twisted something in his chest.

"The book," he remembered. "The Cornwallis Harris first edition."

"My first love gift ever. I bought it when I finally admitted it to myself but I was determined that I would not admit it to you. I am old-fashioned enough to believe the man must speak first."

"I did."

"God, I'll never forget it," she said fervently, and they both thought of the savage confrontation the previous day which had ended incongruously in a declaration of love.

"I try to be unconventional," he said, and she shook her head smiling.

"You succeed, mon amour, oh how you succeed." Then she sobered again. "I was in love with you. Your distress was mine. The child was a lovely girl, she had captivated me when we met and on top of all that I felt deadly responsible for her plight. I had inveigled you into joining my hunt for Caliph, and because of that you had lost your daughter." He bowed his head slightly, remembering how he had believed that she had engineered it. She recognized the gesture.

"Yes, Peter. For me it was the cruel lest stroke. That you should believe it of me. There was nothing that I would not have done to give her back to you and yet there seemed nothing that I could do.

My contacts with French intelligence had nothing for me. They had no inkling of how or where the child was being held and my control at
Mossad was unaccountably evasive. Somehow I had the feeling that
Mossad had the key to the kidnapping. If they were not directly involved they knew more than anybody else. I have already explained that I believed Aaron had given them the identity of Caliph. If that was so, then they must know something that could have helped you to recover your child but from Paris I was powerless to gather that information.

I had to go in person to Israel and confront my control there. It was the one chance that I could get them to cooperate. They might believe my value as an agent was worth enough to give me a lead to
Melissa-Jane-"

"You threatened Mossad with resignation?" Peter asked wonderingly. "You would have done that for me?"

"Oh, Peter, don't you understand? I loved you and I had never been in love before. I
would have done anything for you."

"You make me feel humble, he said.

She did not reply, but let the statement stand as though she were savouring it, then she sighed contentedly and went on. "I left everything in Paris. I have an established routine for disappearing when it is necessary. Pierre took me to Rome in the Lear; from there
I
telephoned you but I could not tell you what I was going to do. Then
I
switched identity and took a commercial flight to Tel Aviv. My task in
Israel was difficult, much more difficult than I had bargained for. It was five days before my control would see me. He is an old friend.

No! perhaps not a friend, but we have known each other a long time.

He is the deputy director of Mossad. That is how highly they value my services, to give me such an important controller, but still it took five days before he would see me, and he was cold.

There was no help they could give me, he said. They knew nothing." She chuckled. "You have never seen me when I want something really badly, Peter. Ha! What a battle.

There is much I knew that would embarrass Mossad with her powerful allies of the West with France and Great Britain and the U.S.A. - I
threatened to hold a Press conference in New York. He became less cold, he told me that the security of the State took precedence over all personal feelings, and I said something very rude about the security of the State, and reminded him of some outstanding business which I would happily leave outstanding. He became warmer but all this was taking time, days, many days, too many days. I was going crazy. I remembered how they had found Aaron's body, and I could not sleep at night for worrying about that lovely child. And you, oh
Peter, you will never know how I prayed to a god that I was not too sure of. You will never know how I wanted to be with you to comfort you. I wanted so desperately just to hear your voice but I could not break my cover from Tel Aviv.