Then she bent down and carefully stationed her candle on the stone. Looking up she said, "Let me have some more of that ouzo. I love being here. It's shocking and wonderful."
No, this was most assuredly the modern Eva. As she moved against him, her body felt the way he remembered it. Riper now perhaps, with a voluptuousness slightly more toward Rubens than Botticelli, but the skin of her breasts, her thighs, was soft as ever. And the dark triangle was still luxuriant, redolent with her scent.
"Do it. Hard. Like a bull. I want to know what she felt." She drew back across the stone as he drove inside her. "Yes"
While rain slammed against the courtyard above, the ancient, foreboding room began to engulf and rule their senses; the feel of her perfumed nipples against him was hard and urgent. It was an erotic moment outside of time.
Now her head thrashed from side to side as quivering orgasms rippled through her, starting in her groin and welling upward as she arched and flung back her hair. Then she drew up, clinging, as though trying to consume him, herself, in a rite of pure bacchanalian frenzy. Her breath had become labored, not gasps of pleasure, but the need of one seeking air.
Eva, Eva, he suddenly caught himself thinking, you're here for release, escape. I know you too well. You're not really in this room anymore. You want to be but you're not. You're somewhere in a realm of beasts and magic and the bloodthirsty Minotaur.
But yet, yet… somehow he'd never felt closer…
A final convulsion brought them together and then she fell back, dazed. The candlelight flickered across the alabaster, sending ghostly apparitions against the fresco of the dolphins. Still trying to catch her breath, she reached out and seized the bottle of ouzo, drank from it thirstily, then flung herself once more against the stone. After another long moment, she pulled him to her.
"Michael, hold me." She snuggled into his arms. "Oh, darling, just hold me."
He drew her against him, and the touch of her skin was erotic beyond anything he remembered….
But the palace… it was intruding darkly, insinuating its presence. Now it surrounded them like a tomb, ominous as death. Finally he turned her face up and examined her dark eyes. They were flooded with fear.
"Look, you've got to tell me what's going on. I want to know the real reason you're here, and I want to know it now. I'd somehow begun to hope it was for us, but—"
"That's part of it, darling. Truly." She kissed him deeply on the mouth, then reached and began fishing in her purse for the battered pack of Dunhills, trying to regain her bravado. "God, that was hot. I do love being here with you."
"You're stalling. Whenever you don't—"
"You're right." She took out a cigarette, flicked her lighter, and drew a lungful of smoke. "Now I see why Pasiphae was such a number. This room does something to you."
"Not bad for starters."
She looked down, then smiled. "No, darling, you're just bluffing. I remember that well enough. Plenty of time for a cigarette."
"Some things improve with age." He studied her beautifully disheveled form. Now more than ever he realized she was scared. "Goddammit, enough. Talk to me."
"All right." She sighed, then leaned back on the ledge of the portico. "Well, to begin at the beginning, I've been seeing somebody lately."
"Make you a deal," he interrupted. "You spare me your stories and I'll spare you mine. This doesn't really seem the moment to start swapping indiscretions."
"I'll bet you've got plenty to swap yourself." She looked him over.
"Hold on a minute." Sure, there'd been women in and out of his life. He wasn't a priest. Besides, he liked women.
"Darling, relax." She patted his thigh. "We're both adults. You said you wanted to hear this, so for godsake listen. His name was Jerry Ackerman and… it started back about nine months ago. Since he was new, he'd drop by my office now and then. You know, to learn the ropes."
"What kind of ropes, exactly?"
"Really, Michael. Anyway, he wasn't exactly world class in the boudoir, if that makes you feel any better. Though needless to say I never told him that. Our little scene tonight would have blown his Brooklyn mind. Now does that preserve your precious male ego? He was just nice, and interesting."
"Was?"
"I'll get to that." She was tracing small circles on the alabaster. "Week before last he dropped off a computer disk at my office. Said he couldn't figure it out. And it was old, maybe two weeks. Which was unusual, especially for satellite intercepts, which this was. Normally we get them the same day. So I ran it through my desk station, figuring it couldn't be that big a deal." She paused nervously, then went on. "Well, the first part was encoded using one of the standard Soviet encryption systems we've had cracked for years, and it had a lot of proper names. But the rest of it was just a string of numbers. No matter what I tried, I got nothing but garbage."
"Really? I thought Fort Meade's football field of Cray supercomputers could crack anything."
"I thought so too. But this encryption was either so clever, or so simple, nothing seemed to click. I couldn't do it. I even began to wonder, maybe it's not a cipher at all. Maybe it's just some obscure foreign language. So I matrixed it against some we have in the data base. And, love, we've got them. A zillion megabytes of memory. Serbo-Croatian, Urdu, Basque…" She drew on her cigarette, sending a glow into the dark. Above them the rain continued to pound. "But I still couldn't find anything that would crack it."
"Doesn't sound like you." He drew her around and kissed her. "Half the time you're too smart for your own good."
"Apparently not smart enough." She hugged him back automatically, then continued. "When I told Jerry I couldn't break the encryption, he suddenly got very nervous. Said okay, then he'd just take it and try again himself. So I asked him to sign it out on my log. Just routine. And that's when he started acting strange. At first he refused, but finally he did it when I said, 'It's like this, sweet buns. No tickee, no washee.' By then he'd stopped coming over to my place and things had gotten a little strained at the edges, to put it mildly. So I didn't think too much about it at the time."
"Don't start telling me more about—"
"Michael, that was the last time anybody saw him. He just vanished. That night. There was even something in the paper. 'Mysterious disappearance.' The apartment where he lived had been dismantled. Top to bottom. Somebody must have thought he was holding out."
"And?"
"Well, it just so happened I still had it in computer memory, though that's a blatant violation of security procedures. Anyway, the next day I called Control and said what's with a certain file? Gave them the NSCID number. And they said, 'We have no record of that number.' Quote. They'd never heard of it. So it must have been a free-lance job for somebody outside. Whoever it was must have paid Jerry, or maybe blackmailed him, into getting me to take a crack at it. Which is why it was two weeks old. It wasn't NSA material at all. Somebody else wanted it, and I'm known far and wide as Ms. Give-Her-the-Tough-Ones."
"You always were the best."
"Right." She laughed, then reached into her purse and retrieved a three and a half inch gray computer disk. "And here it is. A complete copy. I've also got it stored on the eighty-meg hard drive of my Zenith Turbo 486 laptop back at the hotel." She tossed it to him. "Jerry's file. That's the good news. The bad news is, it's still encrypted."
He turned it in his fingers. Welcome to the new age, he thought, when thousands of pages can be packed onto a high-density disk the size of a casette tape.