Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [47]
Mohammed began to fold up the charts. “The day after tomorrow. There is no time to lose.” He replaced the maps in the painted chest, then went to the door.
Jane came in just as he was leaving. He said, “Good night,” to her in an absentminded way. Jean-Pierre was glad the handsome guerrilla no longer had the hots for Jane since her pregnancy. She was definitely oversexed, in Jean-Pierre’s opinion, and quite capable of letting herself be seduced; and for her to have an affair with an Afghan would have caused endless trouble.
Jean-Pierre’s medical bag was on the floor, where he had left it, and Jane bent down to pick it up. His heart missed a beat. He took the bag from her quickly. She gave him a mildly surprised look. “I’ll put this away,” he said. “You see to Chantal. She needs feeding.” He gave the baby to her.
He carried the bag and a lamp into the front room as Jane settled down to feed Chantal. Cartons of medical supplies were stacked on the dirt floor.
Already-opened boxes were arranged on the shopkeeper’s crude wooden shelves. Jean-Pierre put his medical bag on the blue tiled counter and took out a black plastic object about the size and shape of a portable telephone. This he put in his pocket.
He emptied his bag, putting the instruments for sterilization to one side and stowing the unused items on the shelves.
He returned to the living room. “I’m going down to the river to bathe,” he said to Jane. “I’m too dirty to go to bed.”
She gave him the dreamy, contented smile she often wore when feeding the baby. “Be quick,” she said.
He went out.
The village was going to sleep, at last. Lamps still burned in a few houses, and he heard from one window the sound of a woman weeping bitterly, but most places were quiet and dark. Passing the last house in the village, he heard a woman’s voice raised in a high, mournful song of bereavement, and for a moment he felt the crushing weight of the deaths he had caused; then he put the thought out of his mind.
He followed a stony path between two barley fields, looking around constantly and listening carefully: the men of the village would now be at work. In one field he heard the hiss of scythes, and on a narrow terrace he saw two men weeding by lamplight. He did not speak to them.
He reached the river, crossed the ford and climbed the winding path up the opposite cliff. He knew he was quite safe, yet he felt increasingly tense as he ascended the steep path in the faint light.
After ten minutes he reached the high point he was seeking. He took the radio from his pocket and extended its telescopic antenna. It was the latest and most sophisticated small transmitter the KGB had, but even so the terrain here was so inimical to radio transmission that the Russians had built a special relay station, on a hilltop just inside the territory they controlled, to pick up his signals and pass them on.
He pressed the TALK button and spoke in English and in code. “This is Simplex. Come in, please.”
He waited, then called again.
After the third try he got a crackly, accented reply. “Here is Butler. Go ahead, Simplex.”
“Your party was a big success.”
“I repeat: The party was a big success,” came the reply.
“Twenty-seven people attended and one more came later.”
“I repeat: Twenty-seven attended and one came later.”
“In preparation for the next one, I need three camels.” In code that meant “Meet me three days from today.”
“I repeat: You need three camels.”
“I will see you at the mosque.” That, too, was code: “the mosque” was a place some miles away where three valleys met.
“I repeat: At the mosque.”
“Today is Sunday.” That was not code: it was a precaution against the possibility that the dullard who was taking all this down might not realize it was after midnight, with the consequence that Jean-Pierre’s contact would arrive a day early at the rendezvous.
“I repeat: Today is Sunday.”
“Over and out.”
Jean-Pierre collapsed the antenna and returned the radio to his pocket; then he made