“No,” she shook her head.
“Since then?”
“No,“again.
He searched his memory, trying for a sympathetic echo.
There was none.
“All right.” He accepted that as having no immediate If value.
“We’ll just remember it for now. Let’s come to my name Peter Stride.
What did you make of that?”
“It didn’t mean anything then, except as a shock.
Strangely enough I did not immediately think of you, but I thought of confusion between the kidnapper and the Victim’s dna.” Stride?” he asked. “Peter Stride? I don’t understand.”
“No, well Melissa-Jane is a Stride also.”
“Yes, of course. They didn’t give you the name
Peter Stride then?”
“No. Just Stride.”
“I see.” Peter stopped in mid-pace as an idea struck him and stared out thoughtfully to where the ocean met a blue horizon.
“But they gave me your full name later,” she interrupted his thoughts.
“When?”
“After we received the news that Melissa-Jane had been rescued. Of course, I wanted to return to Paris immediately to be with you. I was able to get onto a flight from Ben, Gurion Airport six hours after we heard the news. My heart was singing, Peter.
Melissa-Jane was safe, and I was in love.
I was going to be with you very soon. At the airport, while I was going through the security check before departure, the policewoman took me aside to the security office. My control was waiting for me there. He had rushed out from Tel Aviv to catch me before I left for home, and he was very worried. They had just received an urgent message from Cactus Flower. General Peter Stride was now definitely
Caliph -motivated, and would assassinate me at the first opportunity,
he told me. And I laughed at him but he was deadly serious. “My dear Baroness, Cactus Flower is a firstclass man. You must take this warning seriously,” he kept repeating.” Magda shrugged. “I still did not believe it, Peter. It was impossible. I loved you, and I knew you loved me although perhaps you had not yet realized that yourself. It was crazy.
But on the aircraft I had time to think. My control at Mossad has never been wrong before. Can you imagine my dilemma now how dearly I
wanted to be with you, and yet I was now terrified not that you would kill me. That did not seem important but that you would truly turn out to be Caliph. That was what really frightened me. You see, I had never loved a man before. I don’t think I could have stood it.” She was quiet for a while, remembering the pain and confusion, and then she shook her head so that the thick fall of dark shimmering hair rustled around her shoulders.
“Once I reached Paris, my first concern was to learn that you and
Melissa-Jane were safe at Abbots Yew, and then I could begin to try and find out how much substance there was in Cactus Flower’s warning but until I could count on how safe it was I could not take the chance of being alone with you. Every time you attempted to contact me, I had to deny you, and it felt as though some little part of me was dying.” She reached across and took his hand now, opened the fingers and bowed her head to kiss the palm and then held it to her cheek as she went on.
“A hundred times I convinced myself that it could not be true, and
I was on the point of going to you. Oh, Peter finally I could take it no longer. I decided to meet you at Orly that day and find out one way or the other, end the terrible uncertainty, I had the grey wolves with me, a” you remember, and they had been warned to expect trouble I
didn’t tell them to watch you,” she explained quickly, as if You were part of Caliph, you see, and it would have been the wise thing to do.
I admit that I thought of it, Peter. Have you killed, before you could kill V: me but it was only a thought and it did not go farther than that. Instead I went on with the business of living, work has always been an opiate for me. If I work hard enough I can forget anything but this time it didn’t turn out that way. I’ve said it before, but it explains so much that I will say it again. I had never been in love before, Peter, and I could not turn it off. It tormented me, and I
cherished doubts about Cactus Flower’s warning and what I had seen so clearly in the lounge at Orly Airport. It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be true I loved you and you loved me, and you just couldn’t be plotting to kill me. I almost convinced myself of that.” She laughed curtly, but it had no humour in the sound, only the bitterness of disillusion.
“I came out here-” she made a gesture that embraced sea and sky and islands to be away from the temptation of going to you. A
sanctuary where I could recover from my wounds and begin to get over you. But it didn’t work, Peter.
It was worse here. I had more time to think, to torture myself with wild speculation and grotesque theories. There was only one way.
Finally I recognized that. I would bring trying to dispel any memory of disloyalty, “but if you had tried to get at me they would have “She broke off, and let his hand fall away from her cheek. “The moment you walked into the private lounge at Orly, I saw it was true. I could sense it, there was an aura of death around you. It was the most frightening and devastating moment of my life, you looked like a different man not the Peter Stride I knew your whole face seemed to be altered and restructured by hatred and anger. I kissed you goodbye,
because I knew we could never meet again.” Remembering it her face darkened with sadness, as though a cloud shadow had passed over them.
“I even thought that I had to protect myself by” She gagged the words.
you out here and give you the chance to kill me.” She laughed again, and now there was the old husky warmth in it. “It was the most crazy thing I have ever done in my life but thank God, I did it.”
“We went right to the very brink,” Peter agreed.
“Peter, why didn’t you ask me outright if I was Caliph?” she wanted to know.
“The same reason you didn’t ask me outright if I was plotting to kill you.”
“ she agreed. “We were just caught up in the web that
Caliph had spun for us. I have only one more question, Peter cheri.
If I was Caliph, do you truly believe that I would have been so stupid as to give my telephone number at Rambouillet to the man who kidnapped
Melissa-Jane, and instruct him to ring me for a friendly chat whenever he felt like it?” Peter looked startled, “I thought-” he began, then stopped. No, I didn’t think. I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. Of course, you wouldn’t have done that and yet, even the cleverest criminals make the most elementary mistakes.”
“Not those who have been trained at the Odessa school,” she reminded him, and seemed immediately to regret the words, for she went on quickly. “So there is my side of the story, Peter. I may have left something out if you can think of anything, then ask me, darling, and I’ll try to fill in any missing pieces.” And so they started once again at the very beginning, and went over the ground minutely, searching for anything they might have overlooked at the first telling of it, this time exhaustively re-examining each fact from every angle, both of them applying their trained minds to the full without being able to come up with more than they already had.
“One thing we must never let out of sight for a moment is the quality of the opposition.” Peter summed it up as the sun began lowering itself towards the western horizon, its majestic progress flanked by cohorts of cumulonimbus cloud rising into towering anvil heads over the scattered islands, like silent nuclear explosions.
“There are layers upon layers, reasons behind reasons, the kidnapping of Melissa-Jane was not merely to force me to assassinate
Kingston Parker, but you as well the proverbial two birds with a third bird to follow. If I had succeeded I would have been hooked into
Caliph for ever.”
“Where do you and I go from here, Peter?” she asked,
