Jean-Pierre listened, fascinated despite the pain. Could it be that there was still a chance of wreaking his revenge?
"Catching him would almost make up for losing Masud," Anatoly went on, and Jean-Pierre's heart leaped with new hope. "Not only would we have neutralized the single most dangerous agent the imperialists have. Think of it: a real live CIA man caught here in Afghanistan. . . . For three years the American propaganda machine has been saying that the Afghan bandits are freedom fighters waging a heroic David-and-Goliath struggle against the might of the Soviet Union. Now we have proof of what we have been saying all along—that Masud and the others are mere lackeys of American imperialism. We can put Ellis on trial. ..."
"But the Western newspapers will deny everything," said Jean-Pierre. "The capitalist press—"
"Who cares about the West? It is the nonaligned countries, the Third World waverers, and the Muslim nations in particular whom we want to impress."
It was possible, Jean-Pierre realized, to turn this into a triumph; and it would still be a triumph for him personally, because it was he who had alerted the Russians to the presence of a CIA agent in the Five Lions Valley.
"Now," said Anatoly, "where is Ellis tonight?"
"He moves around with Masud," said Jean-Pierre. Catching Ellis was easier said than done: it had taken Jean-Pierre a whole year to pin down Masud.
"I don't see why he should continue to be with Masud," said Anatoly. "Did he have a base?"
"Yes—he lived with a family in Banda, theoretically. But he was rarely there."
"Nevertheless, that is obviously the place to begin."
Yes, of course, thought Jean-Pierre. If Ellis is not at Banda, somebody there may know where he has gone. . . . Somebody like Jane. If Anatoly went to Banda looking for Ellis, he might at the same time find Jane. Jean-Pierre's pain seemed to ease as he realized that he might get his revenge on the establishment, capture Ellis, who had stolen his triumph, and get Jane and Chantal back. "Will I go with you to Banda?" he asked.
Anatoly considered. "I think so. You know the village and the people—it may be useful to have you on hand."
Jean-Pierre struggled to his feet, gritting his teeth against the agony in his groin. "When do we go?"
"Now," said Anatoly.
CHAPTER 14
ELLIS WAS HURRYING to catch a train, and he was panicking even though he knew he was dreaming. First he could not park his car—he was driving Gill's Honda—then he could not find the ticket window. Having decided to get on the train without a ticket, he found himself pushing through a dense crowd of people in the vast concourse of Grand Central Station. At that point he remembered that he had dreamed this dream before, several times, and quite recently; and he never caught the train. The dreams always left him with an unbearable feeling that all happiness had passed him by, permanently, and now he was terrified that the same thing would happen again. He shoved through the crowd with increasing violence, and at last reached the gate. This was where he had previously stood watching the rear end of the train disappear into the distance, but today it was in the station. He ran along the platform and jumped aboard just as it started to move.
He was so delighted to have caught the train that he felt almost high. He took his seat, and it did not seem at all strange that he was in a sleeping bag with Jane. Outside the train's windows, dawn was breaking over the Five Lions Valley.
There was no sharp division between sleep and wakeful-ness. The train gradually faded until all that was left was the sleeping bag and the Valley and Jane and the sense of delight. At some point during the short night they had zipped up the bag, and now they lay very close together, hardly able to move. He could feel her warm breath on his neck, and her enlarged breasts were squashed against his ribs. Her bones prodded him, her hip and her knee, her elbow and her foot, but he liked it. They had always slept close together, he remembered. The antique bed in her Paris apartment had been too small for anything else anyway. His own bed had been bigger, but even there they had slept entangled. She always claimed that he molested her during the night, but he never remembered it in the morning.
It was a long time since he had slept all night with a woman. He tried to recall who was the last one, and realized it was Jane: the girls he had taken to his apartment in Washington had never stayed for breakfast.
Jane was the last and the only person with whom he had had such uninhibited sex. He ran over in his mind the things they had done last night, and he began to get an erection. There seemed to be no limit to the number of times he could get hard with her. In Paris they had sometimes stayed in bed all day, getting up only to raid the fridge or open some wine, and he would come five or six times, while she just lost count of her orgasms. He had never thought of himself as a sexual athlete, and subsequent experience proved that he was not, except with her. She freed something that was imprisoned, when he was with other women, by fear or guilt or something. No one else had done that to him, although one woman had come close: a Vietnamese with whom he had had a brief, doomed affair in 1970.
It was obvious that he had never stopped loving Jane. For the past year he had done his work, dated women, visited Petal and gone to the supermarket like an actor playing a part, pretending for the sake of verisimilitude that this was the real him, but knowing in his heart of hearts that it was not. He would have mourned her forever if he had not come to Afghanistan.
It seemed to him that he was often blind to the most important facts about himself. He had not realized, back in 1968, that he wanted to fight for his country; he had not realized that he did not want to marry Gill; in Vietnam he had not realized that he was against the war. Each of these revelations had astonished him and overturned his whole life. Self-deceit was not necessarily a bad thing, he believed: he could not have survived the war without it, and what would he have done if he had never come to Afghanistan other than tell himself he did not want Jane?
Do I have her now? he wondered. She had not said much, except I love you, dear, sleep well just as he was falling asleep. He thought it the most delightful thing he had ever heard.
"What are you smiling about?"
He opened his eyes and looked at her, "I thought you were asleep," he replied.
"I've been watching you. You looked so happy."
"Yes." He took a deep breath of the cool morning air and raised himself on his elbow to look across the Valley. The fields were almost colorless in the dawn light, and the sky was pearl-gray. He was on the point of telling her what he was happy about when he heard a buzzing noise. He cocked his head to listen.
"What is it?" she said.
He put a finger to her lips. A moment later she heard it. In a few seconds the noise swelled until it was unmistakably the sound of helicopters. Ellis had a sense of impending disaster. "Oh, shit," he said feelingly.
The aircraft came into view over their heads, emerging from behind the mountain: three hunchbacked Hinds bristling with armament and one big troop-carrying Hip.
"Get your head in," Ellis snapped at Jane. The sleeping bag was brown and dusty, like the ground all around them: if they could stay under it they might be invisible from the air. The guerrillas employed the same principle in hiding from aircraft—they covered themselves with the mud-colored blankets, called pattus, they all carried.
Jane burrowed down into the sleeping bag. The bag had a flap at its open end to hold a pillow, although there was no pillow in it at the moment. If they got the flap above them it would cover their heads. Ellis held Jane tight and rolled over, and the pillowcase flopped over. Now they were practically invisible.
They lay on their stomachs, he half on top of her, and looked down at the village. The helicopters seemed to be descending.