Betrayals (43 page)

Baxeter wasn't away the forty-eight hours he'd estimated. He called on the evening of the second night and met her in a restaurant in Ayios Dhometios they had not used before. He was there before her, and as Janet sat down the man said: “John is still there.”

Janet tried to think of something appropriate to say but couldn't. “Good,” she mumbled.

Baxeter leaned intensely across the table towards her. He said: “It's vital you understand the importance of learning the precise day the Americans are going to go in!”

“Why?”

“I've been to Tel Aviv,” disclosed Baxeter.

Janet frowned over the table, trying to understand the significance. “So?”

“From what Willsher told you is it obvious the Americans are planning a frontal assault, backed up by air support and whatever else from their fleet?” said the Israeli.

“I guess so,” agreed Janet. “I hadn't thought about it to that extent: Willsher said they were prepared.”

“It won't work,” declared Baxeter, flatly. “It can't work.”

“Can't work!” The anxiety flared through her.

“Even if they achieve complete surprise there'll still be some resistance,” predicted Baxeter. “Our military people in Tel Aviv estimate that moving at the maximum possible speed—night is the logical attack time, which is going to cause further hindrance—it will take an hour from the moment they hit the beach to get to where John is, in Kantari …” Baxeter stopped, hesitating at what he had to say. “By which time John will have been moved,” he said. Bluntly he added: “Or killed!”

“No!” moaned Janet, softly. “It can't go on like this! It just can't. It's got to stop!”

“That's why my knowing the actual day is important.”

“Why?”

“We've decided to use the American landing as a diversionary tactic,” said Baxeter. “We're going to send a commando team in ahead of them. We'll get John out.”

29

J
anet sensed the atmosphere the moment she entered the map-strewn room, the sort of solemnity that remains after a disagreement or a dispute, except no one looked as if they had been arguing. Willsher was in his preferred chair, at the center of the table, and the soldier who had interrupted them on the previous occasion was by the furthest blackboard, where the maps had been coordinated with photographs. He still wore his unmarked fatigues. Knox was at the window. He gave Janet the briefest welcoming smile and then looked back at the fourth man in the room, who was sitting alongside Willsher. He was elderly, with a hedge of straggling white hair around a bald dome. He wore half-rim spectacles low on his nose and a crumpled, neglected sports jacket over an equally crumpled and neglected checked sports shirt, without a tie.

The man stopped talking when Janet entered the room, looking expectantly towards her. Willsher stood, holding out his hand in invitation towards a chair opposite them and said: “I'm glad you're here, Ms. Stone: seems there is something we haven't allowed for.” The CIA official half-turned to the man beside him. “Professor Robards,” he said in introduction.

“What hasn't been allowed for?” asked Janet, not sitting.

“John's mental condition,” announced Willsher.

“His what!”

“My specialty is the psychological affect of long incarceration,” explained Robards. “I've worked with some of the men imprisoned by the North Vietnamese during the war. And latterly tried to expand it to include the traumas likely to be suffered by kidnap victims such as John: people who've spent time possibly in solitary confinement, possibly experiencing some degree of torture and certainly with captors they identify as enemies, not knowing if at any moment they are going to be killed.”

Robards had an unemotional, scholarly delivery, talking as if to a class of students. Janet considered it altogether too sterile and distant. She said: “You think John will be traumatized?”

“It's inevitable,” said the psychologist, flatly. “The only uncertainty is to what degree. He could have the mental strength to recover in a day: alternately it could take months and maybe even require psychiatric treatment.”

Janet looked at Willsher, remembering. “You told me he could stand it!” she said.

“I thought he would be able to,” said the man, apologetically. “I didn't know.”

“No one knows,” reiterated Robards. “I've encountered men built like trees whom I would have bet could withstand any sort of stress, but who have collapsed almost at once and taken years to recover. And wimpy little guys weighing ninety pounds who've taken everything and walked away without a mental mark.”

“Is that why you're here, to treat him?” Janet asked.

“Langley thought it might be a precaution,” said Willsher, answering for the man.

“And I'm glad you're here, too,” Robards said to her.

“Why?”

“Like I told you, John's spent quite a lot of time not knowing what to expect from one minute to the next. He's going to be rescued by a commando group making a sudden assault: there'll be a great deal of noise: explosions, shooting, stuff like that …”

“… A great deal,” endorsed the unnamed officer. “A primary tactic is to disorient with as much noise as possible.”

What was she doing! Janet demanded of herself. What was she doing sitting here, listening to these people talk about rescuing John when she already knew they weren't going to rescue John at all! Tell them, she thought at once. Tell them and … and what? How could she tell them without exposing herself and Baxeter? And John: John too. John wouldn't survive the frontal assault, Baxeter had told her. And Baxeter was an Israeli. Hadn't the Israelis done in Entebbe exactly what was being planned here: hadn't the Ugandan assault been used by Willsher himself as a role model? Weren't they experts, the people who knew best? The American attempt to rescue the Iran hostages had been a disaster. She had to leave it to the experts. Janet felt constrained, straitjacketed by the conflicting demands: and she felt something else, a rumbling churn of nausea deep in her stomach.

“… John won't know what's happening,” the psychologist was saying. “It won't initially occur to him that it's a rescue. He'll think it's what he's been threatened with, ever since he was seized. It will be the moment of maximum pressure, maximum terror. And then there'll be the pendulum swing, from terror to relief when he realizes it's the Americans coming in: that's the likeliest snapping point, that swing from one extreme to the other …”

Stop! thought Janet: stop! stop! stop! She said: “Why is my being here important?”

“Because yours is the face he'll recognize,” said Robards. “People held like John seize upon images that mean the most to them: that's how they cling to reality. How John will have clung, thinking of the person closest to him in the world.”

Janet closed her eyes, swallowing against the sickness bubbling up through her. Why, of anything she could have asked, had she posed a question to get an answer like that? She was only vaguely aware of Robards's voice, talking on.

“I'm sorry to have been so blunt,” apologized the man, misconstruing her emotion. “It's important you know how difficult it might be.”

Janet opened her eyes, forcing the smile. “Thank you for setting it out as you have.”

“I'm sure it's not going to be like that!” tried Knox, from near the window. “I'm sure it's all going to work out great!”

“It won't fail from lack of preparation,” came in the commando officer, joining in the encouragement. “We're as ready as we're ever likely to be.”

“Which brings us back to you, Ms. Stone,” said Willsher.

Janet stirred, gratefully. She had to get out, she thought. The constricted feeling had gone beyond a mental impression. She felt the room closing in upon her, walls and ceiling pressing around her, squeezing her breathless. She said: “It's the same location. John hasn't been moved.”

“Son of a bitch!” said the soldier, driving a fist into the palm of his other hand in satisfied excitement. “Just what I wanted to hear.”

“We can go then,” said Willsher. It was not really a question, but the soldier responded.

“Two ackemma tomorrow,” he said.

She had it, Janet accepted. She had the precise information required by one man she loved to free the other man she loved. Jesus! she thought, despairingly.

Knox offered to accompany her back to the hotel but Janet said she wanted to be alone and the CIA officer withdrew at once, imagining her need for solitude to be caused by the nearness of the operation, with no way of knowing the proper reason. Or the seed of an idea germinating in her mind.

She had the limousine drop her by the old city, and wended her way completely across the Greek-held section to emerge by the Famagusta Gate. Baxeter was waiting as he'd promised he would be, parked in Themis Street. The Volkswagen was dirty, as it had been the first time she'd ridden in it: why did such inconsequential things register?

He drove off as soon as she got in. “You were much longer than I expected,” he said.

Janet didn't bother with an explanation. The determination that had started to grow on her way from the embassy was hardening within her. She said: “Are you to be part of the commando assault?”

Baxeter glanced quickly across at her and then back at the road. “Yes,” he said. “I'm trained.”

“I want to come,” announced Janet.

“What!” Baxeter had taken Kennedy Avenue, driving without any particular intention towards Famagusta. He jerked the car hurriedly into the side of the road, cranking on the handbrake.

“I want to come,” repeated Janet.

“That's absurd! Utterly absurd! Laughable!”

“Not to me,” she said. “Nothing seems laughable to me: absurd a lot of the time but never laughable.”

“Why!”

“I've just had a long lecture about John's needs,” said Janet. “It was very convincing. I think it's about time I started doing the right thing and considered John's needs, don't you? John's needs rather than my needs or your needs.”

“I promise you he will be gotten out,” said Baxeter.

“I know the time,” said Janet. “The precise hour and the precise day. Unless you agree to my coming I don't intend to tell you.”

“Darling, this
is
ridiculous. How can you expect us to take you? You're an …”

“… Amateur,” finished Janet, for him. “I won't get in the way. I'll do exactly what I am told, when I am told. I must be there, when John is freed. He's got to see my face.”

“No.”

“I mean what I say.”

“It's not my decision.”

“Then I'll rely on the Americans,” said Janet. She stopped, breathing in courage for the final, determined ultimatum. “And I'll tell them what you intended to do: how you intended to use their assault as a diversion. I know what that will mean: for me personally. What they'll learn. I don't care, if it'll help what they're trying to do. They might need to alter their planning. It's got to work: that's all that matters. That John is freed.”

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