"I was. I thought you knew. I"ve been waiting two days for you to make a move."
He shook his head, remembering the hours in the Mebsher, what he had interpreted as the silent cold disdain pouring out of her towards him. Had he totally misunderstood? Well, it no longer mattered.
Now he could look at her directly he saw that she bore no physical resemblance to Melanie, even superficially. She was broader, taller, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were slightly fuller, her waist was narrower. He guessed she was younger than Melanie had been, but it was difficult to tell by how much.
"I still don"t know your name. Or who you are."
"You needn"t know."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because of what I am and why I"m here with you."
"Then what are you?"
"A woman with physical needs."
"And why?"
"The same needs."
"More than that."
"A woman whose job doesn"t allow her a private life, so her physical needs become urgent."
"So you take what you can."
"No, I have almost no life outside my work. You have no idea of the arranging I"ve had to go to for you, tonight. Or the risk I"m running."
"Please tell me your name," he said.
She held up her fingers, touched each one with her other hand, as if counting. She smiled. "Flo," she said. "You can call me Flo."
"Is that your real name?"
"It could be." She was sitting erect, her back straight, her arms stretched out before her. She touched her fingertips to his chest. Her legs were folded around each other. She held his gaze steadily. It was an unnerving kind of calmness, not created by inner peace but by seeming to use some kind of tight control on herself. Tarent realized it made him tense up in reaction to it, because he did not know what she might do. He knew she was for some reason playing with him. "Flo was what they called me," she said. "Years ago. No one uses that name now, so you can."
"Is it based on Florence?"
"For a time I was a Florence. But that was never who I was. Nor what I am. Not then, not now." She was obviously tiring of his questions about her name, and used her fingers to flick his bare shoulder in mock annoyance. "I still want those pictures you took of me."
Trying to tease, he said, "You"ve gone to a lot of trouble for a couple of photographs, Flo."
"No. I wanted to f.u.c.k you. If you think that was trouble, you should see the trouble I can make for people if I have to. Going after a f.u.c.k is not what I call trouble."
"OK. Shall we have another f.u.c.k? Flo?"
"In a while." She shifted her position, leaning back a little and stretching out her legs in front of her. She pinned them against his sides. "I"m still too hot."
She raised herself, reached for the window catch behind Tarent"s head. Her breast brushed against his cheek as she strained at the immovable bolt. The window remained sealed up, and she subsided.
"In some of our buildings, a few of the windows still open," she said.
"Our buildings?"
"The MoD."
"So that"s who you work for."
"Why are you so curious about me?"
"I like to know who I"m with. All I know about you is that you travel about the country in an armoured Mebsher, with a minder."
"So do you."
"I don"t have a minder."
"As it happens, you do. As it happens, it"s me. I"ve been a.s.signed to you."
"I was told I"d missed the transport I was supposed to be in. They said there was another Mebsher in the region and it detoured to pick me up. That doesn"t sound like you were a.s.signed to anything. You just happened to be aboard."
"We knew where you were. After the storm had pa.s.sed a call went out for one of the personnel carriers to collect you. There are four or five Mebshers en route to Hull at the moment there"s a departmental meeting coming up. When I heard it was you, I decided I"d be the one to pick you up."
"I thought you said you don"t go to trouble to get laid."
"I don"t. Trouble is what I do when I"m in the office. I wanted to meet you, not because I wanted to get laid but because of what happened to you in Turkey."
"So how do you know about me?"
"We have ways. You"re at diplomatic level, which means the files are open to our office." She briefly tossed her head, flicked her hair back. She laid her fingers on the implant, indicating it. "I knew most things about you before the call, and today I found out the rest. Your wife Melanie Tarent, I heard what happened to her. I also know where you were until last week, and what happened to Melanie. She was killed in violent circ.u.mstances that were never discovered or explained. Well, I can fill you in with a few details about that. We have established that she was killed by a radical wing of the insurgency in Anatolia, and they were using a new kind of weapon. We have people out in Turkey looking into that at the moment. Did you know they caught the people responsible?"
That startled him. "No, I didn"t. When did that happen?"
"The day after you left. We were trying to get them back to IRGB innocent until proved guilty, of course. We wanted to ask them a few questions first. On the way they were killed by another group of militiamen, who ambushed our convoy. Two of our people were killed too, several more injured. We think it was a local dispute, and there were two militias operating in that area. They were going for each other. But I thought you might like to know."
"I"m sorry to hear that. I had no idea more people had died."
"They weren"t there for your sake. We wanted to find out where the insurgents were getting their weapons."
"You said it was a new device. I was there after the explosion and saw the crater. It was obviously some kind of roadside bomb. We saw those all the time."
"What did you notice about the crater?"
Her tone had been playful Tarent nearly answered in kind. Instead, he said, "What should I have noticed?"
"You were there." She had not changed her manner. "What did you see?"
"It was a triangle. It had three straight sides, and they made up what looked like a regular triangle."
"Could you explain it? Did anyone else talk about it?"
"Not that I remember. I wasn"t listening to anyone else. I think I was in shock, after Melanie."
"That"s what we are working on now." She sat forward, looked around the tiny room. "Do you have any drink in here? I mean, a real drink?"
"Just water. We"re in a government building."
"I could work around that if you"d like to wait here for half an hour. Anyway, not all government buildings are the same."
"Meaning that the one you work in isn"t?"
"No ours is the same. Alcohol not allowed. But there are ways. Come round to see me one afternoon and I"ll introduce you to single malt." She rolled to the side, climbed off the bed. Tarent stared greedily at her long legs, her toned upper body, the perspiration still shining on her in patches. She filled two plastic cups from the cooler tap, swallowed all the water from one of the cups in three swift gulps, then pa.s.sed him the other. "That"s enough of a drink for now."
She filled her cup a second time. She dipped her fingers in the cold water and flicked droplets across her arms and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, smeared a handful of water over her belly. She sat down on the narrow bed again, this time sitting close beside him. Playfully she splashed some drops on him. He wet his hand and slid it gently across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then let more drops fall around her neck. His fingers brushed against the implant again.
"So we have established that you work for the government," he said. "That wasn"t difficult. The Ministry of Defence."
"Something like that."
"Come on."
"I"m not formally allowed to say."
"I don"t suppose you"re formally allowed to f.u.c.k recently widowed freelance photographers. Anyway, you say you know everything about me, so you know my security clearance. What"s to lose by telling me where you work?"
"It might lose me the job, for a start. For a woman to get to where I am now wasn"t easy."
"So, let me guess. MoD, Ministry of Defence, we"ve agreed. Your job is high up? Department head?"
"Permanent Secretary. Private Office." She turned her face away from him suddenly, almost as if embarra.s.sed by the revelation.
Tarent opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again.
"I"m not making it up," she said.
He regarded her nakedness, the tangled bedclothes. The hot room was full of her scents. The improbability of it all.
"You"re full of surprises," he said. "Should I know who you are?"
"I hope not. We don"t advertise what we do."
"You"re not a Muslim, is that right?"
"Yes, that"s right. I"m not."
"I thought-"
"You have to be neither male nor a Muslim, although if you saw the civil servants at my rank in other ministries that"s what you"d think. But I guessed long ago that being a woman and not being a Muslim were balancing opposites, and went for it. I worked hard, got a good degree, was willing to work for a year as an unpaid intern. Then . . . I rose through the ranks. I"m ambitious and I climbed quickly. My minister is an enlightened man. He"s what used to be called westernized. He likes soccer and cricket and heavy rock, he goes to the theatre when he can. He enjoys having women around him, and he likes non-Muslims working under him. Most of my staff are female."
"So who is your minister?"
"His Supreme Royal Highness, Prince Ammari."
In spite of everything she had said in the last two or three minutes, and even though he was expecting to be surprised again, Tarent almost missed a breath. Sheik Muhammad Ammari was Secretary of State for Defence, probably the highest ranking cabinet minister after the PM. This woman with the slim and sweaty body, the calm hands, the disarrayed hair, the candid eyes and the heady perfumes of after-s.e.x, in effect ran the Ministry of Defence. She would be administratively responsible for the armed services, and held extensive delegated powers.
He reached down to the mess of clothes on the floor and disentangled his trousers, the legs turned inside out in his or Flo"s haste to remove them. The Canon was inside his belt pouch. He took it out.
"OK, you get the photos," he said.
He switched on the camera, expanded it, then pressed the GAIN b.u.t.ton. The lab was instantly accessible online, so it took only a matter of seconds for him to locate the three pictures he had taken of her. He held the camera for her to see.
"You know, they don"t matter any more," she said, but she leaned against him to look closely at them. She leant a hand on his knee to support herself. Her nipple brushed against his arm. As photographs the three were not at all special: one was blurred, apparently by a sudden movement of the vehicle, the other two were as sharp as gla.s.s. They showed the half profile view of her that had become familiar to Tarent throughout the journey, leaning forward in her seat, her left hand raised so that her fingers rested lightly in the area behind her ear. Her face could not be seen clearly in either of the two best pictures. The interior of the Mebsher was in the background, dark and utilitarian.
She was resting the side of her head against his, strands of her hair dangling against his shoulder. He put an arm behind her, rested his hand on her backside. The images on the camera reminded him of her physical paradox: that coldness she seemed to radiate, her physical proximity yet her remoteness from him. Now this: her warm, voluptuous body touching his, her light breath on his face. She had told him to call her Flo.
"No one but me would recognize you," he said.
Her hand remained on his leg, her fingers lightly wrapped under his thigh, a gentle rhythm of pressure from her fingers.
"I would," she said. "And His Royal Highness would too."
"OK." He snapped the controller under the thin body of the camera, and waited for the connection to the lab to be confirmed. He selected the three shots and they dissolved into nothingness. "No copies, no back-ups, no originals all gone forever." She made no response. "Don"t you believe me?" he said.
"Yes, I do." She removed her hand from beneath his leg, lightly tapped the implant behind her ear. "I felt them go."
"Is that thing always on?"
"Twenty-four seven, but I can suppress it when I want to sleep." She reached out to take his camera from him. Reluctantly, he let her hold it. She held it up, as if lining up a shot. "I don"t understand how it can take photographs without a lens."
"There"s a lens, but it"s not optical. It"s called a quantum lens. I haven"t used a camera with an optical lens for more than a year."
He pointed out where the three tiny shards at the front of the camera were recessed. He touched the release and they rose silently to form a shallow tepee over the microprocessor aperture. He felt in himself the easy pleasure of talking about the one subject he loved. "These sensors work at particle or sub-particle level. They digitally radicalize the image when the shutter is opened. An electronic lens is more or less automatic: it focuses, sets the aperture, the shutter speed, all in one operation. I can override the settings, but when it"s set to auto every shot is always in focus, always correctly exposed. They haven"t found a way to stop a Mebsher shaking my camera hand, but that will probably be the next technical upgrade."
He was speaking lightly, but when he looked up at her he knew something in her had changed the relaxed playfulness had disappeared.
"Is it your own camera?" she said.
"This one is. I"m evaluating the other two for the manufacturers."
"Don"t you realize it"s illegal to use that kind of camera?"
"I told you I had licences."
"Licences are irrelevant. If that camera is using adjacency technology, then taking photographs with it was banned last year."
"I never heard about that."
"Ignorance of the law is no defence-"