Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [110]
“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 FOURTEEN
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 wakefulness. 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