Katrine had been blessed with a body that provided her inordinate pleasure in any number of places. As always, she responded readily to Lange's touch. Only when she was completely satiated did she turn her considerable skills upon Lange. She was a torturous lover, so in tune with Lange's body that each time he was about to lose control, she released him and left him to suffer without absolution. When he could stand no more, Lange took matters into his own hands, grasping Katrine by the hips and thrusting himself inside her from behind. It was closer to conquest than he would have preferred, but it was exactly how Katrine had planned it. As Lange reached his climax, his head rolled back and he shouted like a madman at the ceiling. Katrine was looking over her shoulder at him, watching him with a look of deep satisfaction, for she had beaten him once again.
When it was over, she lay with her head on his chest and her hair strewn across his stomach. Lange looked out the French doors at the trees on the edge of the forest. A storm had moved in from the channel, and the trees were bent by the wind. Lange toyed with Katrine's hair, but she did not stir. Because they had killed together, Lange could make love to her without inhibition and without the latent fear that he might reveal something of himself. He did not love Katrine, but he was fond of her. In fact, she was the only woman he truly cared for at all.
I miss it so," she murmured.
"What's that, Katrine?"
The fight." She turned her face to him. "Now I sit here in Val-niont, living on the trust fund of a father I despise, and wait to grow 'd. I don't want to grow old. I want to fight."
"We were foolish children. Now we're wiser."
"And you kill for anyone, as long as the price is right, of course."
Lange put a finger on her lips. "I never had the benefit of a trust fund, Katrine."
"Is that why you're a professional assassin?"
"I have certain skills--skills that the marketplace demands."
"You sound like such a proper capitalist."
"Haven't you heard? The capitalists won. The forces of good have been crushed beneath the heel of profit and greed. Now you can eat at McDonald's and visit Euro Disney whenever you please. You've earned your quiet life and your beautiful villa. Sit back and enjoy the satisfaction of a noble defeat."
"You're such a hypocrite," she said.
"I prefer to think of myself as a realist."
"Who are you killing for?"
Men we once despised, he thought. Then he said: "You know the rules, Katrine. Close your eyes."
When Katrine was asleep, Lange slipped from the bed, dressed quietly, and went outside. He opened the trunk of the Peugeot and removed Peter Malone's laptop computer, then tucked it beneath his coat and trotted back into the villa through the rain. Inside, he made a fire of apple wood and settled himself on the comfortable couch in Katrine's sitting room. He lifted the computer's cover, switched on the power, and waited for it to boot up. Under his agreement with Carlo Casagrande, Lange was obliged to deliver the computer and the other things he had taken from Malone's office to a safe-deposit box in Zurich. While the computer was still in his possession, he had no qualms about taking a look for himself.
He opened Malone's documents folder and inspected the dates and times of the latest entries. In the final hour of his life, the reporter had created two new documents, one entitled Israeli Assassin, the second labeled Benjamin Stern Murder. Lange felt a lightness in his fingertips. Outside, the wind of the Channel storm sounded like a passing bullet train.
He opened the first file. It was a remarkable document. Shortly before Lange had entered Malone's flat, the investigative journalist had interviewed a man who claimed to be an Israeli assassin. Lange read the file with a certain professional admiration. The man had had quite a colorful and productive career: Black September, a couple of Libyans, an Iraqi nuclear scientist. Abu Jihad. ..
Lange stopped reading and looked out the French doors at the trees twisting in the storm. Abu Jihad? Had the killer of Abu Jihad truly been in Malone's apartment a few hours before Lange? If it was true, what on earth was he doing there? Lange was not a man who put much stock in coincidence. The answer, he suspected, could be found in the second document. He opened it and started to read.
Five minutes later, Lange looked up. It was worse than he had feared. The Israeli agent who had calmly walked into Abu Jihad's villa in Tunis and killed him was now investigating the murder of Professor Benjamin Stern. Lange wondered why the Jewish professor's death would be of interest to Israeli intelligence. The answer seemed simple: The professor must have been an agent of some sort.
He was furious with Carlo Casagrande. If Casagrande had told him that Benjamin Stern was connected to Israeli intelligence, he might very well have refused the contract. The Israelis unnerved him. They played the game differently than the Western Europeans and the Americans. They came from a tough neighborhood, and the shadow of the Holocaust hung over their every decision. It led them to deal with their adversaries in a ruthless and pitiless fashion. They had pursued Lange once before, after a kidnapping and ransom operation he had carried out on behalf of Abu Jihad. He had managed to slip through their fingers by taking the rather draconian step of killing all his accomplices.
Lange wondered whether Carlo Casagrande was aware of the Israeli's involvement--and if he was, why he hadn't hired Lange to deal with it. Perhaps Casagrande didn't know how to find the Israeli. Thanks to the documents on Peter Malone's computer, Lange did know how to find him, and he had no intention of waiting for orders from Casagrande to act. He had a slight advantage, a brief window of opportunity, but he had to move swiftly or the window would close.
He copied the two files onto a disk, then erased them from the hard drive. Katrine, wrapped in the duvet from her bed, came into the room and sat down at the other end of the couch. Lange closed the computer.
"You promised to cook for me," she said. "I'm famished."
"I have to go to Paris."
"Now?"
Lange nodded.
"Can't it wait until morning?"
He shook his head.
"What's so important in Paris?"
Lange looked out the window. "I need to find a man."
Rashid Husseini did not look much like a professional terrorist. He had a round fleshy face and large brown eyes heavy with fatigue. His wrinkled tweed jacket and turtleneck sweater gave him the appearance of a doctoral student at work on a dissertation he could not quite finish. It wasn't far from the truth. Husseini lived in France on a student visa, though he rarely found time to attend his courses at the Sorbonne. He taught English at a language center in a dreary Muslim suburb north of Paris, did the odd bit of translation work, and occasionally wrote incendiary commentary for various left-wing French journals. Eric Lange was aware of the true source of Husseini's income. He worked for a branch of the Palestinian Authority few people knew about. Rashid Husseini-- student, translator, journalist--was chief of European operations for the PLO's foreign intelligence service. Husseini was the reason Eric Lange had come to Paris.
Lange telephoned the Palestinian at his apartment on the rue de Tournon. An hour later, they met in a deserted brasserie in the Luxembourg Quarter. Husseini, a secular Palestinian nationalist of the old school, drank red wine. Alcohol made him talkative. He lectured Lange on the suffering of the Palestinian people. It was virtually identical to the diatribe he had inflicted on Lange in Tunis twenty years ago, when he and Abu Jihad were trying to seduce Lange into working for the Palestinian cause. The land and the olive trees, the injustice and the humiliation. "The Jews are the world's new Nazis," Husseini opined. "In the West Bank and Gaza, they operate like the Gestapo and the SS. The Israeli prime minister? He's a war criminal who deserves the justice of Nuremberg." Lange bided his time, stirring his coffee with a tiny silver spoon and nodding sagely at appropriate moments. He couldn't help but feel sorry for Husseini. The war had passed him by. Once it had been waged by men like Rashid Husseini, intellectuals who read Camus in French and screwed stupid German girls on the beaches of St. Tropez.