The Omega Terror

EIGHT

It was a long drive to Mhamid. Gabrielle became very sleepy about dawn, and I pulled over for a while so we could get a couple of hours’ sleep. When we started off again, the sun was high in the sky.

The wound Djenina had inflicted on me was clotting and looked pretty good, but Gabrielle insisted on stopping in a mountain village around noon to put a proper bandage and some medication on it. For a good part of the afternoon, we drove through mountains, which dwindled to hills, and finally we emerged in arid desert country. We were in the wild, almost uninhabited area around the border, the place where Li Yuen had located Zeno’s laboratory. Occasionally, there were heavy rock outcroppings, but generally the terrain was flat, dotted with twisted, ugly plant life, a land where mountain and desert met and no one cared to live except a few primitive tribes and snakes and vultures.

We reached the tiny village of Mhamid, the only island of civilization in that vast wilderness, in late afternoon. If my memory of the map was correct, we were still quite a distance from the remotely situated research facility. At first there appeared to be no place for overnight accomodations, but then we drove up to a small, white building that pretended to be a hotel. Looking at its peeling adobe walls, Gabrielle grimaced.

“Do you think we dare sleep in a place like that?” she asked.

“We don’t have much choice. I don’t want to go looking for the lab today, with dusk coming soon. And we both need rest.”

We parked the Citrõen, and a small group of young Bedouins gathered around it curiously. They obviously didn’t get a look at many automobiles around here. Gabrielle locked the car, and we went into the hotel.

It was even less appealing inside than it had been from the street. A walnut-skinned Arab greeted us from behind a small counter that passed for a desk. He wore a tarboosh on his head and an earring in one ear. There were white lines around his eyes where the sun had not reached, and he had a sparse stubble of beard on a weak chin.

“Salaam.” The man smiled at us.

“Salaam” I said. “Do you speak English?”

“Angleesh?” he repeated.

Gabrielle spoke to him in French. “We want a room for two.”

“Ah,” he answered in that language. “Of course. It happens that our best suite is available. Please.”

He took us up a flight of rickety wood stairs that I was sure would collapse under our weight. We went down a dim, dingy corridor to the room He opened the door proudly, and we entered. I saw the repulsion on Gabrielle’s face as she looked around. It was very Spartan, with one large iron bed that sagged in the middle, a broken-shuttered window that opened onto the dirt street below, and cracked plaster walls.

“If you’d rather not….” I said to her.

“It’s all right,” she said, looking for the bath.

“The bath is just down the hall,” the clerk said in French, guessing her question. “I will heat some water for madame.”

“That would be very nice,” she said.

He disappeared, and we were alone. I smiled and shook my head. “Just think,” I said. “Hot and cold running fleas.”

“We will do fine,” she assured me. “I am going to take a hot bath, and then we will try to find a cafe.”

“Okay. I saw a bar next door, an ugly little place, but maybe they don’t water the whisky. I need something after that drive. I’ll be back by the time you’ve finished your bath.”

“It’s a deal,” she said.

I went back down the rickety stairs and outside to the bar next to the hotel. I sat at one of four old tables and ordered a whisky from a short man in baggy pants and tarboosh, but he told me they didn’t serve whisky. I settled for a local wine. At another table near me an Arab sat alone; he was slightly under the influence already.

“You are American?” he asked me in my native tongue.

I glanced at him. “Yes, American.”

“I speak American,” he said smugly.

“That’s very nice.”

“I speak good American, is it not true?”

I sighed. “True, true.” The waiter brought my wine, and I took a sip. It wasn’t bad.

“I am the hair-cutter here.”

I glanced over at him. He was a short man in his mid-forties, I guessed, but there was a great deal of aging in his face. He wore a dark red fez and a striped djellaba. Both were soiled with dust and sweat

“I am the hair-cutter for the entire village of Mhamid.”

I nodded to him and sipped the wine.

“My father was a hair-cutter also.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

He rose with a glass in his hand and joined me at my table. He leaned toward me conspiratorially.

“I am the hair-cutter for the strangers also.” He said it in a half-whisper, near my ear, and I could smell his foul breath. The waiter, over in a far corner, could not hear.

I glanced at the Arab beside me. He was grinning, and he was missing a front tooth. “Strangers?” I asked.

He glanced at the waiter, to be doubly sure he could not hear, then continued in the hoarse whisper, fouling my nostrils with his breath. “Yes, the ones at the clinic. I go out every week, you see. It is all very secret.”

He could only be talking about the lab. I turned to him. “You cut the hair of the doctors out there?”

“Yes, yes. And the soldiers as well. They depend on me.” He gave me a toothless grin. “Every week I go.” The grin slid away. “But you must tell no one. It is all very private, you see.”

“Were you there today?” I probed.

“No, of course not. I would not go two days together. I go tomorrow morning, and I would not go twice, you understand.”

“Of course,” I said. “And you take the old caravan road to the east?”

He moved his head away from me. “I cannot tell you that! It is very private.”

He had raised his voice somewhat. I downed the drink and stood up. I threw some dirhams onto the table. “Buy yourself another drink,” I said.

His eyes brightened. “May Allah go with you,” he murmured in a slurred voice.

“Praise be to Allah,” I replied.

When I returned to the hotel room, Gabrielle was through bathing; it was getting dark outside. She had not dressed yet and was combing her long, red hair, sitting on the edge of the bed with a towel wrapped around her. I sat on a straight chair nearby and glanced up at a fifteen-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“He shouldn’t have gone to all the expense,” I remarked.

“At least we won’t be spending much time here,” Gabrielle said. “Did you have a whisky?”

“Nothing quite that civilized. But I did meet a man who just may be able to help us.”

“What man?”

I told her about the Arab barber. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to meet him out there,” I said. “But he doesn’t know it.”

“For what purpose?”

“I’ll tell you all about it at dinner.” I rose and removed my jacket; Gabrielle noticed Wilhelmina on my side and Hugo’s sheath on my arm.

“I am frightened for you, Nick,” she said. “Why can’t I go with you?”

“We’ve been all through that,” I told her. “You’re going to drive me out there and then re-turn here and wait. If you wait for more than twenty-four hours, you’re then to presume I didn’t make it, and you’re going back to Tangier and tell the whole story to the authorities. You will also contact Colin Pryor and tell him what happened. He will contact my people.”

“Your wound is not even healed,” she protested. “Look, it has bled through the bandage. You need a doctor and rest.”

I grinned. “Maybe with all that high-powered talent out there somebody will offer me a change of bandage.”

I took the holster off and started unbuttoning my shirt, preparing to clean up. When she saw my bare chest, she rose from the bed, dropped the comb and moved over to me.

“I like you very much, you know.”

She pressed herself against me, and I could feel the soft body underneath the towel “The feeling is mutual, Gabrielle,” I whispered.

She reached up to my mouth with her lips and pressed her open mouth to mine. Her body was warm against me.

“Make love to me again,” she breathed.

I touched her downy cheek with my lips, and then the softness of her throat and her milky shoulder. “What about our dinner?”

“I want you for dinner,” she answered in a husky voice.

Her hips pressed insistently against mine, and as I moved my hands over the towel, our lips met again, and my mouth explored hers hungrily. When we parted she was breathing hard.

“I’ll just lock the door,” I said. I went to the door and turned the key in the lock. When I turned back, she was unwinding the big towel.

The towel dropped to the floor and Gabrielle stood nude under the dim light of the small bulb. The soft light made her skin look peach-colored, with the dazzling red mane flowing down onto her bare shoulders. Her long thighs tapered beautifully from the soft curves of her hips. She walked over to the bed and curled up on it, waiting.

I undressed and joined her on the bed. She threw a thigh over me and nuzzled my right arm with a breast. She leaned over and touched her mouth to my chest, then moved down to my stomach, placing careful kisses all along my body.

In moments I was burning inside. I gently pressed her back onto the bed and moved over her. Suddenly we were one, our bodies united. She moaned, her legs locked around me, her hands caressing my back.

When it was over, I had no thought of Omega or Dr. Z or of tomorrow. There was only the warm, contented present.