ADAM HALL - The Kobra Manifesto

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.