Jet

Chapter 22

The staff at the Leonardo hotel in Haifa were professional and courteous, and within minutes, Jet had paid for a mini-suite on the seventh floor overlooking the sea. The bellboy waited patiently to escort her to the room while she walked to the bank of pay phones near the lobby restrooms and slipped David a room key and a small brochure with the room number scrawled on it. On the outskirts of town, they had stopped at a store to buy a calling card for him to use, and now David was deep in conversation, the telephone handset locked to his ear.

The room was lavish compared to the dumps she had been staying in, and she spent a few moments on the balcony, watching the distant lights of boats in the Mediterranean, before returning inside and closing the curtains. She quickly undressed and then moved into the bathroom, where she stood under the pulsing shower spray, savoring the warm stream of water on her skin. She was in the process of rinsing the floral shampoo out of her hair when she heard the room door close and David’s voice call out.

“I’m taking a shower,” she called, and then the bathroom door opened.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to intrude. I’m done downstairs, so let me know when you’re finished. I want to rinse off, too.”

She caught his glance darting at her nude reflection in the mirror even as he appeared to be averting his eyes.

“I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

She reluctantly turned off the water and then stepped out of the shower. After rummaging through the hotel hospitality kit, she brushed her teeth, then realized that she’d left her clothes in the other room. Fortunately, the towels were oversized, and after blotting her hair, she wrapped one around her torso and opened the door.

“It’s all yours,” she said.

David stripped off his shirt and went into the bathroom. The incision looked a lot better. He was definitely healing quickly.

Jet sat down at the desk near the window and appraised her reflection in the mirror: wet hair hanging in her face, bullet graze on her shoulder almost healed. She inspected the gash on her hand. It was time for those stitches to come out. More than time.

She stepped over to the bed and switched on the television, tuning in to the local news before turning off the beside lamp. The shootout in Tel Aviv was all over the airwaves, and it was being described, as was the gun battle at the safe house, as a terrorist attack. An earnest government spokesman droned on and on about recent agitation and an increase in violent rhetoric from Islamic fundamentalists, and finished with an outraged promise to track down the groups responsible for the reprehensible attacks and deal with them swiftly and unequivocally.

Jet had long ago given up wondering how much of whatever the media disseminated was actually true. Her cynicism was bred by her job, where nothing was ever as it seemed and duplicity was second nature. It only figured that governments were cut from the same bolt of cloth as the agencies they spawned.

She heard the water shut off, and then the door opened, and a still-dripping David emerged with a towel wrapped around his waist.

“That felt great,” he said as he plopped down on the bed next to her and turned the volume up using the remote.

She traced her fingers over the stitches on his abdomen.

“You still in one piece?”

“The shower made me a new man. Or at least a slightly less battered one,” he said with a small grin.

“How did your calls go?”

“Not bad. I reached a contact I have with the Americans who owes me a bucket load of favors, and asked him for anything he could get on Belize. He’s the one who acted as our liaison in Algiers — he passed the information on to the Mossad about the meeting, and he’s been helpful on several other matters since then. A good guy. He said to give him twenty-four hours. He’s high up in the CIA, so he might be able to help us.”

“Well, that’s positive. And what about saving our asses and getting us out of Israel?”

“That could be a little more difficult. I’m going to have to go back downstairs and call again in about an hour, after he’s had a chance to see what he can come up with.”

She fingered one of his stitches.

“Ow. Watch it. That hurts.” He put his hand over hers.

“I need to pull my stitches tomorrow,” she said.

“You never told me what happened — how you got that slice on your hand.”

“A gardening accident.”

He turned his head to look at her, and she smiled and snuggled closer to him. She moved her damp head and rested it on his shoulder, and then tentatively tilted her face up, her full lips parting as she kissed his mouth, her tongue finding his as she inhaled the sweet aroma of his freshly-scrubbed skin. A commercial came on the TV advertising a fruit juice cocktail, and he groaned as she slid her hand under his towel. Her pulse quickened as a rush of familiar sensations flooded her awareness, and then her towel fell open, and she was plunging into a warm sea, her senses hungry for a touch she’d never expected to feel again.

David lay spent, a trickle of sweat lazily finding its way down his hairline to his ear, her head on his shoulder, his arms around her incredible, naked body.

His mind drifted to the events of the last few days, and then back to the last time he’d seen her. She’d been so adamant about getting out of the game and starting over. Maybe he should have figured out a way to do the same and gone with her — a thought he’d nurtured every day since her car had exploded on the deserted street in Northern Africa. But the truth was that he still believed back then, and he couldn’t just walk away. He’d taken an oath, and his country required men like him to keep the barbarians at bay. Sometimes there was a very wide gray area between what was legal and what was necessary, but he’d never questioned that he was on the side of right.

Until recently, when the team had been executed and his life’s work had come crashing down around him. With Eli compromised, there was no telling who else Grigenko and his cronies in the Russian intelligence service had turned — when you went fishing, you put out as many lines as possible, and he expected the Russian had done the same. Which meant that every one of the team’s recent actions could have well been to remove rivals to Grigenko’s growing commercial interests, and had little or nothing to do with national security.

David was used to living in a moral no-man’s zone, but when his confidence in the system abandoned him, suddenly his choices seemed more questionable than ever. Thinking back to Algiers, did they really know for sure that those petroleum executives and ministers had been terrorist financiers? He’d never heard of any of them until receiving the tip from the CIA. But where had the CIA gotten wind of it? Wasn’t it equally likely that Grigenko’s reach extended to that agency as well? Could David ever be sure that any of the supposed reasons behind the missions his team had carried out were those he had been fed?

He pushed the thought aside and stroked her hair. He couldn’t change anything at this point.

Still, he regretted so many things. Not the least of which was losing her, and the actions he’d subsequently taken.

If he could turn back the clock, he would have played things so differently. But at the time, he’d done what seemed necessary to protect those he cared about most. For all of her conviction that she could start over, he knew that the world didn’t work that way. She could never be a hundred percent safe — not with the number of enemies she had accumulated. He had wanted to warn her, but had chosen not to — and now she’d found out the hard way and had barely escaped with her life.

There was so much he wished he could tell her, but now wasn’t the time. The last thing he needed was to complicate their already volatile situation with confessions and begging for forgiveness. There would always be time for that later. Not now. Not here. And not under these circumstances.

Would she ever be able to forgive him?

Could he ever forgive himself?

Glancing at his watch, he listened to the soft sound of her gentle breathing, then inched away from her, pausing to admire the golden brown of her skin. Nature and genetics had been exceptionally kind. Perhaps that was how the universe worked: it compensated for the bad luck with offsetting positives.

Ever since he’d first laid eyes on her, he’d felt an irresistible attraction. Something far more than simple lust, it had been seismic and relentless. Neither of them had any choice in it, and he idly wondered whether there was actually something to the whole idea of soul mates or love at first sight. The intensity of his feelings for her had frightened him — he was used to being in control, and this was a storm, a hurricane of emotion that he was powerless to manipulate. He’d never had that happen before, and he’d certainly had his share of romantic interludes.

No, Jet was a game changer.

David sat up, and she shifted, curling into a fetal position and murmuring sleepily to herself.

She looked like an angel when she was sleeping. So perfect, yet so lethal. A cobra in a model’s body.

Whatever happened, however things turned out, he would make different choices this time around. They had been presented with a second chance. That never happened.

This time he wouldn’t blow it. He’d be worthy of her trust.

He pulled on his shirt and pants and took the room key card before slipping out into the hall. Hopefully, his contact would have a solution for getting them out of Israel. He had no doubt they would escape.

Money and desperation were powerful forces, and they had ample quantities of both.