Before Deker could ask what that meant, the inn manager returned and said, “We’ve got rooms and girls for you both.”
“I’m not interested in your girls,” Elezar scoffed.
“Then I’ve got boys for you.”
Elezar’s face turned red. “That won’t be necessary. I only want a room for the night and privacy.”
“You, old and ugly, follow me,” the manager told Elezar, and then looked at Deker. “You, young and handsome, follow her. She’ll take you to Rahab.”
The manager was pointing to a young girl no older than thirteen—a belly dancer, by the looks of her satin top, flowing pants, bells and glitter, and not a professional yet.
As Deker followed the girl down a long hallway, he began to wonder what he would actually have to do with this woman Rahab in order to secure her help in escaping capture. Elezar had suggested she was likely two decades Deker’s senior, and old Caleb had warned from the outset that she was not to be trusted and should be treated only as their last resort. Apparently there was no such thing as a hooker with a heart of gold in this world, only a hooker with a heart
Deker and the girl emerged into a cobbled courtyard surrounded by walls. One of those walls was the city wall itself, rising up five meters before his eyes. He could see a Reahn helmet and spear floating at the top.
There was a gate at the far end of the courtyard and, on the right, stone steps leading to the upper levels of the villa, a level higher than even the city wall. This was where the girl stopped and allowed him to continue alone.
As Deker climbed from one level to the next, a magnificent view unfolded below him. There were the catwalks and guards on the walls, and beyond the city he could see the dark hills to the north rolling beneath the moon.
At the top of the steps he emerged onto a broad terrace. There was the scent of almond trees as he passed through an iron gate into a semitropical paradise. The sound of water was everywhere, splashing in fountains and gurgling in the conduits as it dropped from terrace to terrace between palm trees.
In the center was a large divan with a rainbow of colorful pillows. To the side was a long table of jars and bowls of fruit beneath a pergola. The pergola had golden flax stalks piled on top, no doubt to dry during the day, which lent a Polynesian air to the terrace.
Deker watched the door in the wall on the opposite side, waiting for Rahab to appear. But the door remained shut, and he walked over to the table beneath the pergola and helped himself to some dates. There he noticed one of the ornamental bowls was filled to the top with gold coins.
Only then was he aware that she was already there. He put the dates down and turned to see her. She was standing at the balustrade of the terrace, looking out across the desert at the pillar of fire in the distance: the signal tower at Shittim.
Her silhouette against the stars was a thing of beauty, and as his eyes adjusted to the nighttime, he could see her black mane of hair dropping between her bare shoulder blades.
She was in some kind of silk wrap that rippled in the breeze, the moonlight revealing a flawless figure underneath. And when she turned to face him, he caught his breath.
The high cheekbones, the wide-set and intelligent eyes and the birthmark over her soft upper lip he could never forget. She could be nobody other than Rachel. Even the way her lustrous hair framed her perfect face was exactly the way he remembered her.
Deker could feel her smoky gaze study him as she floated toward him, charging the air around her with palpable electricity. Then she unclipped the bronze clasp on her wrap, and he watched the silk fall like feathers to the tiles to reveal herself to him.
She was wearing the necklace he had brought. The pendant dangled between her full breasts, round as the moon in the sky.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she told him in Hebrew. Her voice was soft but confident.
“Waiting for me?” he asked, astonished. “How long?”
“My whole life,” she said, and then she kissed him with the most delicious lips he had ever tasted.
18
Deker stood there slack-jawed before this girl. And she was just a girl, perhaps only seventeen or eighteen, which was Rachel’s age as he remembered her. But even Rachel hadn’t been this beautiful, and that alone bothered Deker. He began to wonder what sort of fantasy he now held in his arms. Everything inside him told him to run, but her lips felt warm to his as she kissed him again and placed his hands on her breasts. He dared not let go, afraid she might vanish before his eyes.
She smiled as she lifted one of his hands and used it to lead him to her bed—the king-size divan strewn with pillows of assorted shapes and sizes. And without a further word they began to make love to each other under the stars, as if it were the most natural thing in the universe and they had known each other forever.
Her body moved with a grace and in a way that suggested she had all the time in the world. His body responded in a way that suggested he would accept nothing short of eternity with her. She was bringing him to life, and he suddenly felt more awake than he had in years. He could feel his heart beating again, the blood coursing through his veins and pure electricity tingling across his entire body.
Somewhere deep inside, the hard shell around his soul began to crack, light bursting through. The passion for life he had once shared with Rachel, the spontaneity he thought he would never feel again—that force of nature rose up inside him with a volcanic power that couldn’t be contained. He felt his spirit burst free into pure ecstatic flight.
Only when it was over and they were back in each other’s arms on her divan beneath the starry sky, her long, soft legs draped over his own, did he realize that Rahab was not, in fact, his Rachel.
Rahab was taller than Rachel, her raven hair a lighter chestnut color instead of the black he had first imagined. And, yes, more beautiful still. That this was what he should first notice deeply tormented him, and he looked into her eyes, bottomless black pools in which any man could easily drown.
“You said you were waiting for me your whole life. What did you mean?” he finally asked her.
She looked at him curiously, and he realized that while she understood what he said, his accent had thrown her. It was clearly strange and exotic to her ears. He watched her fingers slide down the chain around her neck to the crescent moon lying on her right breast.
“My grandmother, Rahab, gave this necklace to General Bin-Nun forty years ago when he spied out the land and stayed at our family’s inn,” she told him. “He wasn’t a general then, but young and handsome like you. And cut like you.”
He realized she was talking about his circumcision. “And your family inn?”
“Just an inn at the time,” she said. “Bin-Nun assured my grandmother that Moses and the Israelites were coming. She died still waiting. But she lived long enough to see the former Egyptian colonies in Canaan grow more tyrannical, our inn turn into a fertility temple and my mother forced into becoming a priestess. She was only a few years older than I am now when the priests of Molech told her she was getting too old to bless the land. They started me when I was eleven. I built the business, brought in the foreign traders, cut the deals with the priests and the king. Now I run all the girls here—and the officers of Reah too.”
There was some pride in her voice, and Deker could only imagine the course she had had to navigate to achieve her pinnacle of power and influence.
“Yet, you clung to your belief that one day another young Hebrew spy might show up at your doorstep?”
“News of Bin-Nun’s victories in Moab in recent months and the fear gripping Reah told me as much. Your presence in my bed tells me that the attack is coming any day now. And my informants tell me Hamas has his men doing a house-to-house search for you and your comrade at this very moment.”
Suddenly he felt extremely vulnerable, naked with this woman who held his life in the palm of her hand. Any second she could turn him over to Hamas or the troops searching for him throughout the city.
“You know my name,” she asked him. “What’s yours?”
