“Take the dossier, digest it. There is much in there. I will arrange for Sokol to collect you in the morning. If there’s anything you don’t understand, or want to go over, we’ll pick it up tomorrow. How does that sound?”
Orla took the folder from the table and slipped it straight into her bag, as though she was afraid he might change his mind and take it away from her. She couldn’t imagine someone in a similar position in MI5 making the same offer. Perhaps she had misjudged the toad? “That is most considerate of you,” she said. “All of it. Obviously I hadn’t had the chance to think about where I was going to sleep tonight, so thank you. A bit of pampering is exactly what the doctor ordered.”
“Think nothing of it. You have flown a long way to solve the riddle of my friend’s murder. It is the least I can do to thank you. I am told the shiatsu massage is to die for. I wouldn’t know, personally. It has been a long time since I allowed anyone to touch my body.” His eyes momentarily drifted toward the model car on the bookshelf.
She understood.
She started to stand, realizing that her meeting with the toad was over.
“One last thing, if you would,” Gavrel Schnur said, looking up at her. “Before you go, perhaps you might tell me why this thorn in my side was prickly enough to draw you to my city?”
She wasn’t about to lay all of her cards on the table though, not yet. Nothing had changed since she walked in to the toad’s lair. In this world information was still hard currency. It was that simple. He might have just given her a small fortune, or he might have tried to pass off a few counterfeit notes. Without checking out the file Orla had no way of knowing. Of course, to sell her the deal, he was pressing for something in return now. He didn’t want to wait. Quid pro quo.
“Let me read this tonight,” Orla tapped her bag. She kept her voice neutral, light, and made sure she didn’t allow her doubts to creep into her tone. She didn’t want to offend the toad, but neither did she want to tell him everything that she knew.
She reached the door and turned back toward the fat man, deciding, as her hand closed around the door handle, to offer him a little something to whet his enormous appetite. “We believe that this man you call Mabus could be behind the deaths of those people in the photograph with him.” She didn’t say how they had died, or what it was about their deaths that had brought it to Sir Charles’ attention. If Gavrel was as good as she suspected, he already knew and was just looking for confirmation. That, too, was the nature of information in this clandestine world of deceit, half-truths, shadows and eavesdropping. “It’s a link we are very interested in following up. When we get together tomorrow perhaps we can compare notes?”
“I’d like that very much, Miss Nyren,” the toad said.
18
Orla didn’t check into the junior suite at the Dan Tel Aviv.
There was something about the offer that just didn’t sit right with her. She couldn’t put her finger on why it felt off, but try as she might she couldn’t imagine a British spy-master being so considerate or so extravagant. That was enough for her.
Instead she crossed the port and used her “flexible friend” to check into the Dan Panorama.
She had no luggage, but the porter insisted on accompanying her all the way to the room, then held his hand out expectantly. She tipped the guy, apologizing that she didn’t have any local currency. He assured her it wasn’t a problem. The air conditioning was on, and the TV screen welcomed her to the Dan Panorama and hoped she enjoyed her stay. The wide windows looked out over the crystal blue water. The balcony door was half open and inviting. She went out onto it and stood there for a full five minutes, hands braced on the balcony rail, just drinking in the incredible view.
The suite itself was three rooms, a lounge area with two small couches arranged around the flat screen TV and a coffee table. A varied selection of magazines from Business Today to Architectural Monthly, What Photo? and Harper’s were fanned out across the coffee table, light reading for every possible palette. A luxurious robe hung on the back of the door. She ran a hand over its thick plush. Behind the couches was a nicely proportioned dining area. On the table there was a full bowl of fruit stacked high with everything from apples, oranges and grapes to kiwi fruits, guava and papaya. The cooler was stocked with miniature bottles of champagne, San Pellegrino, orange juice, Absolut Vodka, a decent half-bottle of both red and white wine, the usual bags of nuts and enough chocolate for even the sweetest tooth.
She pulled her blouse off, glad to feel the air on her skin, and threw it onto the nearest of the two couches.
She rooted around inside her bag for her cell phone and called in. It was a short conversation; she updated Lethe on what she had unearthed, which, when it came to spelling it out, was very little. The Disciples of Judas, that name again, Mabus, a history lesson and a lot of dead ends. Gavrel Schnur hadn’t said anything about Masada or why the real Akim Caspi had been murdered. She hoped the truth was inside the Mabus dossier, but somehow she didn’t thint was. Truth was an alien concept in this city.
She hung up on Lethe and went through to the bedroom.
It was like something out of A Thousand and One Nights. The bed was covered in sumptuous silks and piled with a dozen pillows. The furniture was rich, black wood, handcrafted with incredible detail. It looked more like a rich man’s brothel than a hotel room.
She put the dossier down on the nightstand, kicked off her shoes, pushed away more than half of the pillows, and lay back on the huge bed.
The mattress fashioned itself to her shape, cocooning her in its soft embrace. A ceiling fan rotated lazily in the heat. Unlike a cheap motel where the fan would have driven her insane with its irritating background groans, this one was oiled precision. She couldn’t rest. She felt itchy in her own skin. After two minutes lying on her back she pushed herself up off the bed. She felt exhaustion sweeping up to meet her thoughts, but she didn’t want to sleep yet. She needed to think. She went through to the bathroom and started to run a bath instead.
Orla set the lights down low and emptied an expensive bottle of bath salts and luxury foam into the water, swirling it around with her hand until it started to bubble up. On the way back out of the bathroom she set the air conditioning to bring the temperature down to a comfortable 68.
In the bedroom she stripped out of her clothes. They smelled like she had been wearing them for two thousand miles. Naked, she stretched, bending her back supine and cracking the vertebrae by leaning first left and then right. She walked across the room to the phone and made arrangements for the maid service to collect her clothes and have them laundered and ready for the morning.
On the wall in the bedroom, there was a motion-sensitive Bang and Olufsen surround sound system. Orla waved her arm across the onyx face, amazed at the luxury money could buy, and the case opened up. The hotel room was better equipped than her entire flat. It ought to have been for the best part of a thousand bucks for the night. Schnur had been right about one thing, sometimes a girl did want a bit of pampering. Inside the surround system, instead of a CD player there was a four-inch touchscreen that listed the various genres preloaded onto the rig. She set it on ’80s shuffle, adjusted the volume and set the speakers to the bathroom, and went back through to the bath. The bubbles in the water were close to overflowing and the mirrors were blind with steam. She turned off the taps, moved the largest of the towels to within reaching distance of the tub, and sank into the suds.
la closed her eyes and savored the stinging heat on her bare skin.
Haircut 100 sang “Fantastic Day” to her through the small speakers set into the tiled wall on either side of the fogged mirror. It didn’t feel fantastic, unless the meaning of the word had been changed to never-ending. She let the water wash over her, cleansing her skin. The tiredness threatened to take her under. She scooped up a
