“Moral obligation! My God, the only moral obligation we have is to our daughter. If she were a soldier on duty, all right. If we were betraying a secret, all right. But we’re not. We’re only saving her life.”
“By using information I hold in trust.”
“Oh dear God, Jack, it’s not buying stocks with insider’s knowledge! It’s our daughter’s life.”
Sally Eastman looked at her husband through a film of angry tears. If there had been one constant in her feelings for him through twenty-seven years of marriage it was respect. Not understanding. Try though she had, she had never been able to understand his soldier’s mind and, dear God, she could not understand it now. But respect him she did.
“All right, darling,” she whispered, “come to bed.”
Eastman undressed quickly and slipped under the covers beside her.
“What time do you have to get up?”
“The switchboard will call.”
Sally leaned over him before switching off her night light, reading the deep hurt in his green eyes. Then she leaned down and kissed him.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, it was just after 10 A.M. when a black Peugeot 204 maneuvered into its reserved parking place in front of one of the Flemish fagades, all of them identical, of the red brick houses lining Amsterdam’s Keerkstraat.
The man getting out of the car was a short, stocky sixty-year-old, his cheeks glowing with the healthy tone of a burgomeister in a Frans Hals oil.
Tucked primly under one arm was a worn black leather briefcase. A few minutes later, in his austere office looking onto the Keerkstraat, Henrick Jagerman opened the case and took out the ingredients of the snack with which he inevitably began his working day: a steaming thermos of black coffee and an apple.
Jagerman was the son of a poor factory worker who had become a prison inspector in the slums of Amsterdam. Trailing along after his father, Jagerman had first felt the stirrings of the uncommon vocation which had brought him to his present office, a deep fascination with the criminal mind. He put himself through college and medical school guiding tourists along the canals and around the museums of Amsterdam, then became a psychiatrist specializing in criminology. When Holland’s forward-looking government decided to set up a task force to study the best ways to deal with terrorist situations, Jagerman had been chosen to sit on it as its psychiatric counselor.
Four times since, when Palestinians seized the French ambassador to The Hague in 1974, when common convicts captured a choir visiting the capital’s jail for a Christmas service, during the two train seizures staged by Holland’s dissident Moluccan community, Jagerman had had the chance to put the theories he had developed in his long hours in prisoners’ cells into practice. So successful were they that he had become known around the world as Dr. Terrorism, admired by policemen and feared by terrorists for the original and innovative methods with which he used manipulative psychology to resolve hostage situations.
He had, quite literally, written the bible on how to deal with terrorists.
Compiled in a limited six-hundredpage edition, it was locked in the vaults of a score of national police services, the indispensable and rigorously secret tool they called on whenever terrorists struck on their soil.
Jagerman had barely turned his attention to the first item on his desk, when, unbidden, his secretary entered the office. He recognized immediately the flustered face of the American ambassador trailing behind her.
The ambassador indicated he had to talk to him alone, then told him what had happened. A jet of the Queen’s Flight, he said, was waiting at Schiphol to fly him to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, where Air France was holding the Washington-bound Concorde for his arrival.
“With luck,” the ambassador remarked, giving his watch a nervous glance, “we can have you at the White House by nine Washington time.”
Jack Eastman was snoring. His wife stared at his body, crumpled in the deep sleep he had long ago learned to force on himself in a crisis.
Forgive me, Jack, she thought. Noiselessly, Sally slipped from the bed and tiptoed out of the room. She walked carefully down the stairs to the telephone in the front hall. The first numbers she dialed were 212, the area code for New York City.
Laila lay on her back, gazing upward into the comforting nothingness of the high-ceilinged room, to the ill-defined point where all form and shape were obliterated by the darkness. The cloying odor of the incense Michael had burned mingled with the lingering fumes left by their grass and the pungent odor their lovemaking had wrung from their bodies.
It was dark except for one pale shaft of light falling across the room and onto the bed from a floor lamp burning in the studio next door. Here and there, along its advance, its soft glow highlighted bits and pieces of the clothing they’d flung about the room in their rush to the bed: Laila’s black satin trousers crumpled in a heap by the door; Michael’s silk shirt spilling from the bed; her flimsy panties wadded into a tight knot and hurled to the floor.
Michael was sprawled on his stomach. He was sound asleep, his head buried in the comforting arc of Laila’s breast and shoulder. One arm lay across her body, its motionless fingers clutching her other breast. To her right, a traveler’s alarm clock in a leather frame rested on Michael’s night table. Its luminous dial read 6:15.
Tenderly, yet absentmindedly, Laila stroked the long hanks of hair spilling down Michael’s back and tried to drive from her consciousness every thought except the recollected pleasure of her spent passion. The light cleaving the room caught the hairs along Michael’s forearm, turning them into a gossamer’s web of silver threads. Everything, it suddenly seemed to Laila, came down to that arm, to the hand encircling her breast. She had to perform one act, one deliberate reflex of the will to move it, to rouse her sleeping lover. All the rest would follow inevitably in the wake of that gesture, each inexorable step leading toward the act to which the luminous hands of the clock summoned her.
She thought of a line from Sartre: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.”
There was no one there to make her move that hand, to put her feet onto the course she had chosen for them. The will to act — or not to act — was hers, and her alone.
Her eyes stared into the darkness overhead. We have no destinies, Sartre had written, other than those we forge ourselves. Well, she thought, I have forged mine. And for better or for worse, the time had come to accomplish it.
She took her free hand and lifted Michael’s wrist from her breast. She drew it to her lips and tenderly kissed his fingertips. He stirred.
“You’re not going?” His eyes blinked reluctantly open and peered up to her.
Sleep had softened their hue from bright blue to a gentle gray.
“I have to, my love, the time has come.”
“Stay,” he whispered.
“Michael, my love, my darling. I can’t. I have to go. I have to.”
She lay there an instant, then she slid out from under his arms and slithered to the floor.
Michael watched dreamy-eyed as she wriggled into her tight black pants, pulled her blouse over her head, scooped her panties from the floor and stuffed them into her handbag.
“When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know, Michael.”