Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [10]
“Save it,” said Bill. “I’m going to debrief you completely back at the Embassy.”
“I’m not going back to the Embassy.”
“John, don’t fight the program.”
“I’ll give you these names. Then you’ll have all the really essential information, even if I get run down by a mad French cab driver this afternoon. If I survive, I’ll meet you tomorrow morning and give you the detail stuff.”
“Why wait?”
“I have a lunch date.”
Bill rolled his eyes up. “I suppose we owe you this,” he said reluctantly.
“That’s what I figured.”
“Who’s your date?”
“Jane Lambert. Hers was one of the names you gave me when you originally briefed me.”
“I remember. I told you that if you wormed your way into her affections she would introduce you to every mad leftist, Arab terrorist, Baader-Meinhof hanger-on and avant-garde poet in Paris.”
“That’s how it worked, except I fell in love with her.”
Bill looked like a Connecticut banker being told that his son is going to marry the daughter of a black millionaire: he did not know whether to be thrilled or appalled. “Uh, what’s she really like?”
“She’s not crazy although she has some crazy friends. What can I tell you? She’s as pretty as a picture, bright as a pin, and horny as a jackass. She’s wonderful. She’s the woman I’ve been looking for all my life.”
“Well, I can see why you’d rather celebrate with her than with me. What are you going to do?”
Ellis smiled. “I’m going to open a bottle of wine, fry a couple of steaks, tell her I catch terrorists for a living and ask her to marry me.”
CHAPTER TWO
Jean-Pierre leaned forward across the canteen table and fixed the brunette with a compassionate gaze. “I think I know how you feel,” he said warmly. “I remember being very depressed toward the end of my first year in medical school. It seems as if you’ve been given more information than one brain can absorb and you just don’t know how you’re going to master it in time for the exams.”
“That’s exactly it,” she said, nodding vigorously. She was almost in tears.
“It’s a good sign,” he reassured her. “It means you’re on top of the course. The people who aren’t worried are the ones who will flunk.”
Her brown eyes were moist with gratitude. “Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
She looked adoringly at him. You’d rather eat me than your lunch, wouldn’t you? he thought. She shifted slightly, and the neck of her sweater gaped open, showing the lacy trimming of her bra. Jean-Pierre was momentarily tempted. In the east wing of the hospital there was a linen closet that was never used after about nine thirty in the morning. Jean-Pierre had taken advantage of it more than once. You could lock the door from the inside and lie down on a soft pile of clean sheets. . . .
The brunette sighed and forked a piece of steak into her mouth, and as she began to chew, Jean-Pierre lost interest. He hated to watch people eat. Anyway, he had only been flexing his muscles, to prove he could still do it: he did not really want to seduce her. She was very pretty, with curly hair and warm Mediterranean coloring, and she had a lovely body, but lately Jean-Pierre had no enthusiasm for casual conquests. The only girl who could fascinate him for more than a few minutes was Jane Lambert—and she would not even kiss him.
He looked away from the brunette, and his gaze roamed restlessly around the hospital canteen. He saw no one he knew. The place was almost empty: he was having lunch early because he was working the early shift.
It was six months now since he had first seen Jane’s stunningly pretty face across a crowded room at a cocktail party to launch a new book on feminist gynecology. He had suggested to her that there was no such thing as feminist medicine: there was just good medicine and bad medicine. She had replied that there was no such thing as Christian mathematics, but still it took a heretic such as Galileo to prove that the earth goes around the sun. Jean-Pierre had exclaimed: “You are right!” in his most disarming manner and they had become friends.
Yet she