“You’d have to show me proof. You might very well be working for any of a dozen other teams.”
“Lean do that.” The man sounded increasingly nervous, his words curt and hurried. He glanced around, up at the galleries, back at the entrance archway.
“Don’t bother. As I told you… honestly… I don’t know who my employer was. I don’t have Pacov now, and I don’t have a goddamned clue where it is.” He permitted himself to bend the truth just a smidgin: his samples were still safely hidden in Indoco’ s Lucknow factory. He had checked.
The other reached into his jacket pocket. Lessing thought he was about to bring out identification, but instead he flipped a packet of snapshots onto the checkered tablecloth “Here you are, Mr. Lessing, ‘feelthy peectures,’ real French postcards.”
Lessing looked.
He could not help it.
The top one showed a woman, completely nude, her limbs spreadeagled and bound to a rivet-studded surface. There was a box with a sort of crank in the bottom righthand foreground, and thin wires led from this to her vagina, to her anus, and to sharp-toothed alligator clips biting into the soft flesh of her inner thighs, her breasts, and her belly.
The woman’s mouth was open; her eyes bulged; her forehead was beaded with the sweat of unendurable torment
The face was Jamecla’s.
Lessing blinked and shuddered, cold fear washing over him like a bucket of ice water. He almost cried out, almost shot the man before him with the spit-shooter hidden beneath the menu. The hell with the rifleman up on the balcony! Then he realized that the photograph had been doctored, the face superimposed. The white streak in the woman’s tangled locks was the sweatband Jameela wore when she exercised. The background beneath her head was not the metal torture-table but the hedge beside Indoco’s tennis court, airbrushed out but not completely matched. Her expression was not one of agony but of excitement and strenuous exertion.
It was a picture Lessing himself had taken during one of Jameela’ s morning tennis matches! These bastards must have stolen it when they ransacked Lessing’s apartment during that last riot at Indoco!
“You son of a bitch…!”
The agent looked apologetic. “It’s not real. Not this time. We don’t want to make it real, Mr. Lessing. But you must understand that we are in deadly earnest Look at the other shots. If we can’t come to an agreement, we’ll let you choose which of our games Miss Husaini gets to play first.”
Lessing let the menu cover slide an inch or so along his out-stretched arm. He was very tempted, whatever the cost.
The kikibird saw the motion and put three fingers up to his cheek. “I drop my hand and my gunman kills you dead, Mr. Lessing. Why can’t you be reasonable?”
Lessing jerked his chin at the pictures. “That’s reasonable?”
“She was an agent for others, Mr. Lessing. She knew the risks.”
“You’re no American. Not using those techniques….”
The man smiled. “Times change, Mr. Lessing. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes quite thinkable today. Well, maybe we are not a regular U.S. agency, but we’re friends with some of them, Mr. Lessing: very close friends.”
Lessing had seen torture before, out in Angola and in Syria. Every nation used it to some degree. It did not so much horrify him as make him furious. He didn’t know whether his anger stemmed from the photographs themselves, from the callous involvement of Jameela, or from the way this urbane kikibird had played on his emotions with the doctored pictures. He said, “Now you get nothing. Nothing at all. No way.”
“No dramatics, please. We can turn the photographs into reality. Indeed, we were planning a live demonstration for you, starring little Amalic here…” he glanced over at the Banger hooker, who was staring in horrified fascination at the photographs “…but she didn’t bring you to the party.” He extracted money from his coat pocket with his free hand and pushed a wad of it at the girl. “Go home. Allez vous!”
She didn’t touch the bills but scrambled up and fled.
“Now, as to Pacov. Who’s got it? We want the whole story.”
Lessing felt the same chill calm that he experienced in combat “You have all you’re going to get from me. If you’re so mere-smart, you know that’s how it works. We go through brokers, do jobs, and go home. No identities, no connections, no politics, no involvements.”
“Like our little French whore, huh?”
“That’s it: leave the money on the bed.”
“You went to see Colonel Copley.”
“I’ll say it again. I got nothing.”
For the first time the agent’s face showed anger. “God damn you, Lessing! You didn’t just hand Pacov over to some anonymous buyer like a bag of cocaine on a street corner! We can take you in… get you out of Paris—”
“For some happy sessions in your basement?”
“You’d sing a lot sweeter with a barbed catheter up your cock and electric needles in your testicles!”
Lessing began to get up, slowly and with care. “It’s time for my dinner, and you’ve already spoiled it.”
“Sit the hell down!” The kikibird almost forgot to keep his fingers pressed against his cheek. Lessing tensed to hurl himself aside, but he didn’t think that would save him, not if the marksman was any good at all.
He let the menu fall away from his hand and opened his fingers a trifle to let the black plastic tube of Wrench’s spit-shooter peep through. He kept his thumb pressed against the open end.
“This,” he said conversationally, “is Pacov-2. You asked for it; you got it.” The agent probably knew that Pacov-2 came in black plastic tubes. Lessing was gambling that the man hadn’t actually seen the stuff: the spit-shooter was only about half the diameter of the Pacov-2 cylinder.
The man goggled at it. “You’re lying…!”
“No. I saved myself a dose or two for insurance. I’m sure you understand. Last night, as soon as I arrived, I cracked a globe of Pacov-1 down the toilet. Now we see whether there has to be an incubation period between Pacov-1 and Pacov-2. You been posted here in Paris for a long time? Your wife and kiddies with you? Do torturers have wives and kiddies?”
For a moment the other sat as though stunned. Then he stood up. “You would do that, Mr. Lessing? Pacov… to Paris?”
“Larger scale than the poor girl in your photographs, but essentially the same thing. Yes, killing you might be worth Paris. It sure as hell is worth my life… to me, anyway.”
“You’ll die with the rest!”
“No way. You see, I injected myself with the antidote before I left India.” It was a whale-sized red herring; as far as Mulder’s people knew, there was no antidote for Pacov.
The agent continued to gape, and his fingers started to come down again. Lessing grated, “Keep them up there. As I said, you can thumb me now, but I’ll still have time to crack Pacov-2 all the hell over you. Nothing would give me more pleasure.”
“Your own government, Lessing! That’s whom you’re betraying!”
“Bullshit. If my own government is using you, then it’s down to the bottom of the barrel, and it deserves what it gets! I don’t believe you anyway.” He had an idea. “Take your wallet out of your pocket and toss it down on the table.”
Grimly, the other complied.
The wallet spilled out French, British, and American money; the pockets held international credit cards and drivers licenses made out in several names, all bland and colorless and false: Mark Leebens, Peter E. Hartmann, Harry Rosch. There were calling cards and business cards, too, all different and quite impersonal; no photographs, no personal notes or addresses.
He sensed a presence beside him and shied away, ready to continue his Pacov bluff or to shoot, whichever was necessary.