ADAM HALL - The Kobra Manifesto

'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 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.

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.

'I 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.