London Twist: A Delilah Novella
ABOUT LONDON TWIST
F
or Delilah, the Mossad’s top seductress, the parameters of the assignment were routine. The contractor: MI6. The objective: infiltrate a terror network, this one operating out of London. The stakes: a series of poison gas attacks on civilian population centers.
There’s just one wrinkle. The target is a woman—as smart, beautiful, and committed as Delilah herself. And for a cynical operative thrust suddenly out of her element, the twists and turns of the spy game are nowhere near as dangerous as the secrets and desires of the human heart.
This story is approximately thirty-six thousand words—the equivalent of about one hundred forty-five paper pages. It is a novella, not a novel.
ALSO BY BARRY EISLER
Novels
John Rain series
A Clean Kill in Tokyo (Originally published as Rain Fall)
A Lonely Resurrection (Originally published as Hard Rain)
Winner Take All (Originally published as Rain Storm)
Redemption Games (Originally published as Killing Rain)
Extremis (Originally published as The Last Assassin)
The Killer Ascendant (Originally published as Requiem for an Assassin)
Ben Treven series
Fault Line
Inside Out
Rain/Treven combined
The Detachment (an Amazon exclusive)
Novellas
London Twist
Short Stories
The Lost Coast
Paris is a Bitch
The Khmer Kill (an Amazon exclusive)
Non-fiction
The Ass is a Poor Receptacle for the Head: Why Democrats Suck at Communication, and How They Could Improve
Be the Monkey: A Conversation About The New World of Publishing (with J.A. Konrath)
Available at
Amazon
and at
Barry’s website store
.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Barry Eisler
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
E–ISBN: 9781477857380
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
•
REFERENCES
•
SOURCES
•
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
•
CONTACT BARRY
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T
here were three of them when Delilah came in, arranged around a square wooden table so that when she sat they’d be facing and flanking her. She wondered why so many. A European boondoggle? A show of force? Safety in numbers? Some combination, probably. Whatever it was, it was hardly business as usual for the Director and two deputies to travel together to a safe house on the outskirts of Amsterdam.
None of them stood, despite certainly having been alerted to her arrival by the two security men in civilian clothes outside, whom she’d recognized by their demeanors and by the slight bulge of the Uzi Pros concealed beneath their jackets. No one spoke as she made her way through the living room, not even after she’d taken the remaining seat at the table. Her years in Paris had accustomed Delilah to small talk, and she had to remind herself that its absence here would be neither rude nor condescending. These men were Israelis, after all, justifiably famous for their gruffness, and beyond that, they had all spent a lifetime in the military and intelligence. She doubted they knew how to make small talk with their own mistresses, let alone with a field agent.
Still, the silence was now getting conspicuously long. She waited, watching them, thinking she’d be damned if she spoke before they so much as explained why she’d been summoned here.
“In case you’re wondering, Delilah,” the Director finally said. “That Saudi mess. It’s been cleaned up.”
She wondered why he was using Hebrew. She preferred to avoid it, staying in character to the extent possible even during a debrief. Was he reminding her of who she really was, who she really worked for? At least he wasn’t using her real name. Maybe he didn’t remember it.
A few strands of blond hair had come loose from her ponytail. She resisted the urge to brush them back, concerned the gesture would be interpreted as nervousness. “You’re talking about Farid?”
“Is there another Saudi mess we don’t know of?”
Farid was a Saudi financier, an unwitting access agent she had slept with and then had difficulty discarding. Increasingly obsessed, he had sent men to hurt her in Paris. They hadn’t succeeded, but from the standpoint of her sick former paramour, it would have been only a missed opportunity. His motivation would have remained.
“Cleaned up how?”
One of the deputies chuckled. “How else? Permanently.”
They were all wearing khaki pants and blue button-down shirts. One uniform in exchange for another. She thought they might as well have worn signs declaring themselves Israelis. But maybe she was being too critical. Most people would make them as indeterminate widowers and retirees, maybe on a European bus tour.
“How did you get to him in Riyadh?”
“We didn’t,” the first deputy said. “MI6 did.”
“At our behest?”
To that, they only nodded, watching her.
She was beginning to understand. “And the British want something in return.”
“Of course,” the Director said, offering her the grandfatherly smile for which he was famous, but that Delilah had always found false and manipulative. “What do you think, they did this for us as charity? They helped us with our problem. Now we have to help them with theirs.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
The second deputy tamped a package of cigarettes on the table. “It could be we’re being too generous in describing the problem as ‘ours.’ Really, it was caused by you.”
She fought to keep the indignation from rising to the surface. “Caused by me?”
The second deputy extracted a cigarette, slid it between his lips, held a lighter to it, drew in, and blew out a cloud of blue-gray smoke. He leaned back and looked at her, frowning. “We’ve discouraged you from continuing to involve yourself personally with that freelancer, John Rain. You didn’t listen.”
She was incredulous. “Rain had nothing to do with Farid. He helped me that night. He spotted the ambush before I did.”
The second deputy took another long drag on his cigarette. She realized he was nervous. They weren’t sure how this meeting would go.
“He saved you, did he?” the second deputy said. “You know what else he did? Two concussions; one broken throat cartilage; one crushed hand; one broken face, including nose, teeth, and cheekbone; two ruptured testicles. Injuries distributed among four men. One of whom—the one who will now never be able to father children, not that this is such a great loss for the planet—Rain chased for over a kilometer through the streets of Paris before catching and maiming him.”
“The other two,” the Director said, “the one whose face you slashed and the one whose knee you destroyed, might have been explained. Even a civilian photographer can get lucky in such circumstances. Maybe she’s been attacked before—she’s certainly attractive enough. So she carries a knife. Maybe she’s taken some karate classes. Her attackers underestimated her. And the moment she’d created an opening for herself? She fled. Rain’s behavior was different. One man, against four? And the gratuitous pursuit of the last one? This is not so easy so to dismiss.”
“And think about it,” the second deputy added. “Injuries like these, and not one death? It’s more difficult to cause such damage than it is to kill someone. Something like this could only have been accomplished by an operator with exceptional self-control. A trained killer, who held back this time so as not to leave a trail of corpses that would attract police attention. So how do you explain what a civilian photographer—who, it seems, might not be so much of a civilian herself—is doing with such a man? Do you understand how much risk you’ve caused to this cover we’ve invested so much to create for you?”
“Create for me?” Delilah said, disgusted. “How generous of you. So MI6 isn’t a charity, but apparently you are.”
She was aware she wasn’t adequately managing her anger, but she didn’t care. The constant doubt, the constant suspicions from her ostensible superiors who couldn’t handle her effectiveness, who couldn’t deal with their own discomfort at how well she literally slept with the enemy at their direction… at some point, she had to attack back or she would choke on her own bile.
And then there was the whole notion of their questioning, probing, her private life. That would have been bad enough, but on top of it was the topic of Rain himself. That memory was as fresh as it was painful. He’d saved her that night, or at least dramatically improved her odds, and she’d treated him horribly afterward. He’d left Paris and they hadn’t spoken since.
“There’s more,” the Director said, saving the second deputy from his misstep. “For whatever reason, perhaps to intimidate the man so he could more effectively interrogate before practically castrating him, Rain told the one he’d chased that the two of you were with GIGN, the French Gendarmerie’s elite counterterrorism unit. All of which got back to Farid.”
He paused, probably hoping Delilah would ask how he knew all this, which would give him the opportunity to remind her of her place by telling her it was all need-to-know. She wouldn’t give him that small satisfaction. Besides, she assumed it was some sort of technical means—a phone or computer tap, a compromised satellite link. They’d been watching Farid closely, after all.
After a moment, the Director continued. “And while Farid himself wasn’t intelligence, he was connected to people who are. I’m sure you understand we can’t afford to have Saudi intelligence scrutinizing you for GIGN ties. Yes, it was just something Rain devised on the spot, but that’s not what matters—the attention is what matters. It might have led to other discoveries, however inadvertent, and things might very quickly have gotten out of control. So we had to deal with Farid immediately.”
“Not to protect my life. To protect my cover.”
“If you think about it,” the first deputy said, his tone not unkind, “those two categories are not so easy to distinguish.”