Daniel Silva - The Secret Servant

“He may have.”

Gabriel walked over and removed the towel from her hair. Heavy and wet, it tumbled riotously onto her dark shoulders. She lifted her face to be kissed and loosened the towel around her body. Maybe Shamron was right, Gabriel thought as she pulled him onto the bed. Maybe he would let Pazner go to Cyprus to meet with the Egyptian after all.

They were both famished after making love. Gabriel sat at the small table in the kitchen, watching the news on television, while Chiara made fettuccine and mushrooms. She was wearing one of Gabriel’s dress shirts, unbuttoned to her abdomen, and nothing else.

“How did you find out that I’d been arrested?”

“I read it in the newspapers like everyone else.” She poured him a glass of red wine. “You were all the rage in Buenos Aires.”

“What kind of work were you doing there?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“I know you were watching members of a Hezbollah cell. I just want to know whether you were part of the actual surveillance team or just an escort officer?”

“I was part of the team,” she said. “I don’t do much escort work anymore.”

“Why did they pull you out?”

“Overexposure to the targets.” Elizabeth Halton’s face appeared suddenly on the television screen. “Pretty girl,” Chiara said. “Why did they take her?”

“I may find out tomorrow.” He told her about his trip to Cyprus.

“What about your dinner with the prime minister?”

Gabriel looked up from the television. “How did you know about that?”

“Shamron told me.”

“So much for operational security,” he said. “What exactly did he say to you?”

She placed the fettuccine in the water to boil and sat down next to him. “He said that you had agreed to succeed Amos as director.”

“I’ve agreed to no such thing.”

“That’s not what Shamron says.”

“Shamron has a long history of hearing exactly what he wants to hear. What else did he say?”

“He wants us to get our personal life in order as soon as possible. He doesn’t think it’s proper for the director to be living with a woman out of wedlock, especially one who happens to be an employee of the Office. He thinks we should accelerate our wedding plans.” She placed a finger beneath his chin and turned his face toward hers. “You agree, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Gabriel hastily. He had learned that any hesitation to engage in a discussion of wedding plans was always wrongly interpreted by Chiara as a reluctance to marry. “We should get married as soon as possible.”

“When?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a very simple question, Gabriel. When do you think we should get married?”

“Late spring,” he said. “Before it gets too hot.”

“May?”

“May would be perfect.”

Chiara removed her fingertip from beneath Gabriel’s chin and nibbled nervously at her nail. “How am I going to plan a wedding in six months?”

“Hire a professional planner to help you.”

“A wedding isn’t an operation, Gabriel. It’s supposed to be planned by family, not a professional.”

“What about Gilah Shamron? She’s the closest thing to a mother I have.”

“Gilah has enough on her plate at the moment looking after her husband.”

“All the more reason to ask her to help with the wedding. Trust me, she’ll jump at the chance.”

“It’s not a bad idea, actually. No wonder Shamron wants you to be the chief. The first thing we have to do is settle on a guest list.”

“That’s easy,” Gabriel said. “Just invite everyone from the Office, Shabak, AMAN, most of the Cabinet, and half of the Knesset. Oh, and don’t forget the prime minister.”

“I’m not sure I want the prime minister to attend my wedding.”

“You’re afraid of being overshadowed by a chubby octogenarian?”

“Yes.”

“The prime minister has three daughters of his own. He’ll make certain not to steal the limelight on your big day.”

“ Our big day, Gabriel.” The water began to boil over. She stood up and walked back over to the stove. “Are you sure you have to go to Cyprus tomorrow?”

“I want to hear what the Egyptian has to say with my own ears.”

“But you’ve only just come home.”

“It’s just for a day or two. Why don’t you come with me? You can work on that suntan of yours.”

“It’s cold in Cyprus this time of year.”

“So you want me to go alone?”

“I’ll come,” she said. “You didn’t say anything about the way I decorated the apartment. Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said hastily. “It’s lovely.”

“I found a ring on the coffee table. Did you put a hot drink on it without a coaster?”

“It was Uzi,” Gabriel said.

Chiara poured the fettuccine into a colander and frowned. “He’s such a slob,” she said. “I don’t know how Bella can live with him.”

The items she had requested lay arranged on an adjacent cot: isopropyl alcohol, cotton swabs, rubber gloves, tweezers, needle-nose pliers, a straight razor, codeine and cephalin tablets, four-by-four sterile pads, medical tape, two eighteen-inch strips of wood, two rolls of bandaging, and two liters of bottled water. She held out her cuffed hands to the one she thought of as Cain. He shook his head.

“I can’t do this with my hands cuffed.”

He hesitated, then removed them.

“The drugs you gave me after you kidnapped me-you have more, I assume.”

Another hesitation, then a reluctant nod.

“I need them. Otherwise, your friend is going to suffer terribly.”

He walked over to the van and returned a moment later with a syringe wrapped in plastic and a vial of clear liquid. Elizabeth looked at the label: KETAMINE. No wonder she’d suffered such terrible hallucinations while the drug was in her system. Anesthesiologists almost never used ketamine without a secondary sedative such as Valium. These idiots had given her several injections of the drug with nothing to blunt its side effects.

She loaded an appropriate dosage, two hundred and fifty milligrams, and injected it into the wounded man’s upper arm. As he slipped slowly into unconsciousness, she broke the needle off the syringe and placed it in the plastic sack from the chemist shop where Cain had purchased the medical supplies. The name and address of the shop were written on the bag in blue lettering. Elizabeth recognized the village. It was located on the Norfolk coastline, northeast of London.

She lifted the blanket and adjusted the lamp, so that the light shone directly into the wound. The round was lodged within the fracture fragments. She opened the bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured a generous amount directly into the wound, then wiped away the puss and other infectious material with a cotton swab. When the wound was sufficiently clean, she sterilized the straight razor and used it to debride the ragged necrotic material along the edges. Then she sterilized the tweezers and spent the next twenty minutes carefully removing fragments of shattered bone and filaments of embedded fabric. Finally, she sterilized the needle-nose pliers and slipped them carefully into the wound. The round was out a moment later, deformed from its impact with the terrorist’s tibia but intact.

She gave the bullet to Cain as a souvenir and prepared for the final stage of the procedure: the dressing and the splint. First she flushed the wound thoroughly with the sterile water, then covered it with a four-by-four sterile pad. Last, she laid the two strips of wood along each side of his lower leg from the knee to the ankle and bound the splint tightly with the rolls of bandaging. When she was finished, she propped the leg on a pillow and looked at Cain.