The Kobra Manifesto

Chapter Thirteen: SHADIA

'The damned creature was twenty feet long, can you imagine?'

Van de Jong broke some bread.

'Who came out of it?' I asked him.

He'd come to join me for dinner at my table and it suited my book: he was a compulsive talker so I didn't have to listen, and he provided good cover. The solitary image is always suspect They both came out of it, of course! He does it for the tourists, when there are any. Listen to me — the anaconda does not crush its victim. It merely throttles it. So all this fellow does is to keep the coils away from his throat. In any case, man is not its habitual prey, so it is just confused when a man comes to wrestle with it, you see.' He gave a laugh, showing a gold tooth. 'But it is fun to watch. You should see it I will take you tomorrow.'

The Kobra cell was across the room: the five men and the woman they called Shadia. The Burdick girl was sitting in the corner with someone on each side of her. They were eating, but seemed more to be waiting.

The Indian boy came to our table again.

'Voce precisa alguma coisa?'

'Nada. Tudo esta bem.'

We were eating paiche with farinha and de Jong was on his third rum punch: he had so far made three jokes about the ulcer I was using as an excuse for not drinking.

The Burdick girl looked pale in the light of the oil lamps. She didn't talk very often but sometimes I could make out a few of the words. The woman was asking her about life in an American college and the answers were token and desultory:

'It's okay, I guess,' and 'you can get into a whole lot of subjects,' mat kind of thing. The Kobra policy was consistent: it was public knowledge mat Pat Burdick was on an expedition in Brazil with selected companions, and she could even be seen there if anyone were interested. The conversation I had so far overheard was about the Amazon, insects, and American college life: all subjects appropriate to the cover. The party wasn't keeping to its quarters upstairs, but was eating openly in public, and I assumed that if anyone went over to the table in the corner and said excuse me but aren't you Pat Burdick she would say yes, I am.

I didn't intend to do that.

'It is different with those damned piranhas, my friend. Have you seen them at work?'

I said I hadn't.

It had taken me a long time to analyse the data inherent in the directive Ferris had given me. London doesn't tell you more than you need to know for your health but it can't stop you forming your own conclusions.

They are not so big,' said de Jong, 'but when they are in a feeding frenzy they can pick a hundred-pound animal down to the bones, can you imagine?' He speared his fish steak with his fork. 'Of course, I suppose we avenge ourselves!' His laughter was attracting some attention among the group of animal trappers near the bar, and someone laughed in response. He seemed to like this, and raised his glass of rum.

The big ceiling fans stirred the air above our heads, and sent the fly-papers twisting. The nights were cooler here: the thermometer by the desk was down to 97° and they'd thrown open the double doors to let the air in through the mosquito screens.

Conclusion 1: Since Ferris had instructed me to knock out the Kobra cell, termination being optional, it was obvious that any physical threat to the Secretary of Defence could be dealt with. Pat Burdick must have been told mat if she tried to escape or call the police her father would be killed and in most hostage situations the captor means what he says. But if I could knock out Kobra it would amount to outside intervention even though the girl hadn't asked for it, and the Bureau must be covering the Defence Secretary in some way.

Conclusion 2: This meant that I could in fact get a message to the girl, to the effect that if she could escape, her father would be safe. But there was a risk and London hadn't told me to do that. Ignore.

Conclusion 3: The Defence Secretary was in constant touch with London and would know that London had someone penetrating the Kobra operation and had obviously asked for his daughter's life to be spared if that were possible. But I believed that even if the Defence Secretary were not involved, the Bureau might have set up the Kobra mission in any case.

Corollary to Conclusion 3: Regardless of the Burdick involvement, London wanted Kobra and they wanted Kobra with that brand of calculated desperation that would keep a human computer like Egerton at the signals console in Whitehall till he dropped dead of fatigue, the brand of desperation that had knocked out one agent after another in Milan and Geneva and Cambodia and New York in order to leave one man alive in the end-phase to do the job.

'That is why my mail order business is successful, you see.' De Jong slit open a papaya with his knife. 'I give them the real thing, and they know it. The jewellery is crude but it is genuine. Look at this!'

He began throwing small objects on to the woven cloth.

I heard the telephone at the desk begin ringing.

'Dyed bones and teeth, fish scales, caiman scales, seed pods, stones. Aren't they attractive? Wouldn't you be tempted to buy this kind of thing if you saw examples in your own mail box?'

Said I would.

I had looked across at the woman several times during the past half an hour and she had twice found my eyes on her. She was young and sexually aware and would expect the distant attention of any man in the room and I was duly giving her mine. The second time she didn't look away and I'd finally turned my head to hear what de Jong was saying.

'I suppose you know what this is? It's a blowgun dart. And I suppose you know what they put on the tip when they mean to kill. Every schoolboy knows.' He pushed the pointed sliver of bone across the cloth towards me.

The telephone had stopped ringing.

'Curare,' said de Jong. 'Of course when I sell these things through the mail there is nothing on their tips — I need live clients, not dead ones!' He laughed loudly and got an echo from the group of steadily-drinking trappers near the bar.

One of the boys was on his way across to the table in the corner.

'You know something? The CIA is in trouble right now for stocking these gadgets, can you imagine? But they use sodium cyanide. You know what they call the gun? A "nondiscernible microbionoculator". Where is progress, my friend?' He raised his glass of rum.

Zade and Kuznetski were leaving the corner table and taking Pat Burdick with mem to the lobby, the boy leading the way. It looked pre-arranged. The three others remained at the table with Shadia. I would have given a lot to follow them out after thirty seconds' interval but that would be fatal.

There was a brief exchange of voices in the lobby and then I beard footsteps on the stairs, hurrying. They were taking the call in one of their rooms. My watch read 21:17 but that didn't mean the call hadn't been arranged to be made precisely on the hour: in a remote village on the Amazon a delay of seventeen minutes would be routine.

In Pat Burdick's frightened eyes there had been the light of hope as she had passed our table. She might not know the terms of the deal but in any case they wouldn't mean anything to her because she was young and she didn't want to die and she wouldn't care if these people were asking an entire squadron of nuclear bombers in exchange for her life. But even if she had enough pride to tell her father he must expend her if that was the only way, she wouldn't be allowed to say it. Zade would have rehearsed her and he'd be there beside her.

Daddy, you must do whatever they tell you.

Van der Jong pushed another artifact across the table.

'Now look at this. Isn't it charming?'

Nobody else had left the dining-room.

Ventura, Ramirez and Sassine were looking casually around them, their glances passing across our table and moving on. Shadia sat watching me, perfectly still.

'I get them from the garimpeiros, when they come down from the goldfields across the Xingu River. I don't know where they get them, but I would say it was from the prostitutes up there. Don't you think this one is charming?'

I looked down at it, away from Shadia's light blue gaze.

It looked like some kind of nutshell, with apertures carved I into it, after the fashion of Chinese trinkets. It appeared to be I filed with coarse, springy hair.

Daddy, they won't hurt me until midnight. Then they say they're going to start hurting me. Can't you do something?

'Of course I don't sell these to my regular clients.'

He gave a confidential laugh, showing his gold tooth.

Shadia watched me.

I looked down again.

The shell was painted gaudily on the outside, in bright childish colours.

'There was quite a demand in Copenhagen, until they got bored with them. Now I sell through the adult bookstores, in Canada.'

Will you still love me. Daddy, please do what they tell you… Please.

Question: what would James Burdick not be prepared to do?

'It's amusing,' I nodded to de Jong.

'One thing I guarantee.' He leaned towards me and the beads of sweat on his pink face gleamed in the light of the oil lamp. 'It comes from a woman. The men are too proud of themselves!'

I assumed that Pat Burdick was the go-between. In most cases of hostage-and-demand the captor handles the communications but in cases where he knows his business he will leave the hostage to make the appeal directly, usually over a telephone or sometimes on tape. This is logical because the demands are usually made to a man-almost always the victim's father — and if he receives threats from another man his male aggressiveness comes into play and he considers himself challenged and will sometimes try to brave it out and urge the police to go in fighting on his behalf.

I had sufficient respect for Satynovich Zade to believe he was handling this operation professionally.

Daddy, they say I won't ever see you again.

In my trade we don't take things personally or if you want to put it another way we take things about as personally as a pilot does when he drops his bombs. But when I killed Zade it would be with a sense of satisfaction.

'Take it. I give you the damned thing!' said de Jong, He threw up his pink hands, laughing generously.

Shadia turned her head a degree to look at him, then looked at me again. It occurred to me that the cell had been making enquiries into the guests here: there were probably fifteen or twenty in the hotel. Their first question to the staff would concern the time of arrival here of each guest. I had arrived on the same day as Zade and there'd been nothing I could do about that.

'Thank you. It's a charming souvenir.'

I put the thing into my pocket to please him.

There were voices upstairs suddenly, and the men near the bar stopped talking and looked at the ceiling. For a moment the whole dining-room was quiet, then people began talking again. In five minutes Zade and Kuznetski came down again with the girl and crossed over to their table. She had been crying, but was making an effort to appear normal, and I don't think anyone would have noticed it unless they'd been watching her closely.

Flat white light came against the windows and a few people turned their heads and looked away again. In a moment distant thunder rolled.

'Have you been here when there is a storm?' asked de Jong.

'Yes.'

He wiped his pink face dry.

'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.

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.

This was routine and my movements were directed mostly by habit; reinforced by experience and training: to leave this room without attending to these details would be like driving a car through a surveillance zone without checking the mirror.

The bathroom looked acceptable and there was nothing missing; the shaver would be in deep shadow if the light were put on in the bedroom so I moved it six inches: a shaver is the last thing in the bathroom a man forgets because it's a lot more expensive than the toothbrush and the other things.

One of the taps was dripping and I left it like that because false impressions are furnished with small details designed to misinform the enquirer at the subliminal level and at that level the sound of a dripping tap is a sign of occupancy.

I stopped to listen. None of the doors on the other side of the courtyard had opened yet: I would have heard them through the bathroom ventilator. I could hear two voices, one of them carrying more than the other, though both men were trying to speak quietly. Zade and Kuznetski.

Theory: Kobra had been waiting for the Secretary of Defence to agree to their terms and arrange the rendezvous for the exchange: Pat Burdick, safe and unharmed, for whatever commodity or facility was demanded. It was unlikely that they would ask James Burdick to come to Brazil, even on the pretext of visiting his daughter during her expedition, because his duties were exacting, and knowledgeable people would be surprised at his sudden absence. Possibly Burdick had been putting up some degree of resistance but had now broken because he believed his daughter to be ill, and the exchange had been agreed on: it was to take place as soon as possible and in the United States, possibly in or near an isolation hospital with tropical medicine facilities.

Theory, not assumption.

Assumptions are dangerous.

I had assumed for instance that when one of the doors was opened on the other side of the courtyard I would catch the sound through the bathroom ventilator, but as I turned to go back into the bedroom I saw the crack of light widening across the floorboards.

I stopped.

The movement of the latch had made no sound: they had taken great care with it. I didn't know if they'd taken the second key from the board in the hall and had been prepared to use it, but that made no difference: I'd left the door unlocked because the gaps in their thinking had worried me and I had wanted to make it easy for them to check on my whereabouts.

The crack of light became a band, tapering from the door towards the bed; it was thrown partly by the lamps outside and partly by the moon. The shadow of the intruder was slowly taking shape as the door was inched wider by infinite degrees.

Tidal breathing, the lungs filled, The drip of the tap.

If they turned to look in the direction of this sound, simply because it was a sound and possessed associations, they would look straight into my face.

Consider immediate action.

Wait Because they were not yet inside the room and couldn't at the moment see me and when they had come far enough to see me they would experience a half-second of shock and would require another half-second in which to react and that would give me time to move.

Without turning my head I looked at the mirror on the dressing table and saw that it formed a blind angle from here to the door: all I could see was the diaphanous whiteness of the mosquito net covering the bed. The shadow forming across the floor was distorted by the angle of contact and it was recognizable only as that of a human being. The door was not yet open more than five or six inches but I noted that the left hand was on the handle.

None of the Kobra cell were left-handed.

Inference: weapon.

The incoming data was increasing rapidly as the light from the balcony flooded softly across the mosquito net, reflecting adiffused radiance. The shadow was taking on form.

The scent of huile de citron.

Shadia.

She used it against the mosquitoes and its lemon sharpness had been on her skin when I was in her room earlier.

The door was now open ten or twelve inches and stopped moving.

Wait.

But consider taking Shadia hostage and trying for a stalemate. It was possible, practicable, and dangerous. But it was not less possible man other moves, and not more dangerous. I think it was the opportunity that looked so attractive so I decided against it.

I listened to her breathing.

The air was perfectly still and she was controlling each breath, but I heard it, and heard the excitement in it. Her shadow was moving, a short linear form bringing in a new component. It was some kind of gun and the muzzle was highlighted by the diffused glow in the room: I would have said it carried a silencer.

This would be the moment.

Later could be too late.

If she saw me now I would have the use of that one final second because her gun hand was against the door and she'd have to move the whole of her body through a right angle before she could take aim and fire. If she moved extremely fast I could finish up running into the first shot at zero range but the risk was calculated and I decided to accept it and began relaxing the leg muscles to whip up the circulation prior to tension.

Empty the lungs slowly. Refill.

Somewhere in the moist air a mosquito whined thinly and we both heard it. She believed that only she heard it. She was keeping absolutely still.

I watched the muzzle of the gun steadily: that was the sole focus of danger and I mustn't let it out of my sight even when I hurled my body against it.

She was within a few feet of where I stood and I could smell the recently-known scent of her body, subtler than the sharpness of the lemon oil.

Final review of situation: she hadn't come here to stand in the doorway and leave again without searching the room and when she began searching the room she would see me and shoot to kill. She was waiting only to make sure that the figure under the mosquito net was still sleeping and in a few seconds now she would move fully into the room.

Findings: it was logical to take her now.

Various sensory data presented itself: my right foot was within an inch of the bathroom doorpost and I would use that to initiate the spring; the muzzle of the gun was approximately waist high and I would go for it with the right hand while the left hand dragged at the door to expose her to the subsequent phases of the attack; the diffused light was sufficient to bring me accurately on to the primary target (the muzzle of the gun), and the brighter illumination from the balcony would give me all I needed to make the necessary movements once the gun was controlled.

Peripheral considerations: she might have time to cry out and for that reason I should make the secondary target her throat; she might drop the gun if I didn't control it before her fingers came open in shock; one or more of the Kobra might come on to the balcony across the courtyard before I could gain conclusive dominance, and I should therefore go in very fast indeed to the primary and secondary targets and use the remaining momentum to pull her bodily away from the door.

In the last few microseconds before any physical action the mind enacts it first, leaving the blueprint for the nervous system to follow. This was happening now but I wasn't conscious of it. Consciously I was tensing the diaphragm, blocking the breath and bracing the right foot against the doorpost But she began shooting before I could move.