Forty-Eight X (21 page)

It’s the fuckin’ mountain air
, he thought.
Why didn’t I ever learn to ski?

Stumpf put one hand under her sweater, pulling her closer to him, feeling the warm skin of her flanks. With his other hand, he took the rock out of his shoe.

They held hands as they walked back to her room. Stumpf held his sweater over his arm. He wanted to hide the erection he had on display. She said little until they entered her hotel room.

“Nate Stumpf,” she said, holding his face gently in her hands, “you are an incredibly fascinating man.” And she kissed him hard again, aggressively pinning him against a wall.

“You’re pretty interesting yourself.”

She undid his shirt and began touching, then kissing his nipples.

Holy Fatal Attraction
, Stumpf thought. He didn’t have a mound in his pants anymore. He had a mountain. And then the part of his brain that he wished he could suppress kicked in.

“Give me a minute, babe.” He set her down on the bed and went into the bathroom. This wasn’t real. This was out of character for her. As much as Stumpf liked to act out the fantasy of himself as some lothario, he knew deep down that he wasn’t. She wasn’t seeing him. She was seeing something else. Maggie Wagner was on something—acid or ecstasy, something.

Stumpf splashed some cold water on his face. He peeked out the bathroom door. She was lying on the bed. She had taken off her blouse and bra, and her firm, large breasts were just lying there beckoning to him.
Get in there and suck her tits
, a horny voice on one side of his head yelled. The other was calling him an asshole. He started hammering at his groin to put out the green light on his manhood. Then, with his libido somewhat suppressed, he suddenly knew exactly what was going on and what he had to do. This was a dirty trick that he himself would have done, and he knew just where to look. Storming back into the bedroom, Stumpf avoided looking at the enticements that awaited him in bed.
For godssake
, he was telling himself,
you’re here for a bigger payday than that
. He went from mirror, to lamp, to—the sconce on the wall. And there it was—a wireless micro-camera. He yanked it out. Were there others? Was his room bugged, too? He looked over to Maggie in bed. She wanted him and titillated him by playing with her breasts.

“Be right back, babe,” he said.

Stumpf ran down to the lobby and slapped Maggie’s room key onto the check-in countertop.

“I need another room,” he announced breathlessly to the receptionist, a young man wearing the hotel’s requisite blue tie and ivory blazer.

“I’m sorry, sir. All of our rooms are booked.”

“You’ve got rooms that are booked for tomorrow. I just need a different one tonight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be back in mine.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Our policy—”

Stumpf got into his pissed-off mode, the kind where his whole face turned beet red, and his voice cracked deeply, like someone possessed in
The Exorcist
.

“Listen to me. I’m gonna tell you once and only once. You’ve got a room. I know you’ve got a room. You’re gonna gimme the key now. I’m gonna pay you for the room. And we’re all gonna be happy.” He paused a moment to let logic sink in. Then he let the devil out. “You don’t, I’m gonna punch you in the face, piss in your lobby, and shit in your kitchen. You’re gonna call the cops. We’ll both be wastin’ our time in court and, in the end, you’ll be black and blue, and your hotel will have a shit-and-piss reputation for years. All for a fuckin’ room. So what do you want to do?”

The desk clerk’s jaw dropped. He seemed speechless. Stumpf had little patience. “Don’t call my bluff,” he said, and he undid his fly. A second later, the desk clerk handed him another room key.

Stumpf opened a Mac laptop in his “new” room and angled it to face the bed. He set the Apple’s built-in camera to
record
mode. Then he went to bring Maggie back to his new “bug-proof” room.

At dawn, with sunlight shimmering off the snow-covered ski runs just outside her window, Maggie Wagner slowly awoke. A haze seemed to cover her eyes and her mind. And then it began to lift. She remembered little of the night before. When she rolled over in bed, she found herself facing Nate Stumpf’s hairy back.

He awoke a moment later with her standing over him wrapped in a sheet and screaming.

“You bastard. You drugged me.”

“No, no.”

“You raped me.”

“No. No. I didn’t.”

Dashing about the room, she flailed about looking for her clothes, and once retrieving them, went into the bathroom to change. And shortly, she came out dressed.

“Someone drugged you,” Stumpf tried to explain, pulling on his pants. “But it wasn’t me.”

“And how did I end up in this room, naked in your bed?”

“We had to sleep somewhere. They bugged our rooms.”

“You’re fired. Just—just get out of my life.”

“Nothin’ happened, babe. Really.”

“I’m not your babe.”

She hurried out of the room, and Stumpf rushed out after her. He held out her laptop computer.

“Take your computer. It’s yours. Look at it. You’ll see. Just look at it.”

She grabbed the laptop and ran off down the hall to her room. Maggie had looked at him in disgust, like a roach too disgusting to stomp on, something you just wanted to get away from quickly. Stumpf had thought that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t drugs and she would awake in the morning to cuddle close to him and smile that toothy smile. But she ran off without even a “thanks” or a “good-bye.” And he had done nothing.
The little princess
, Stumpf thought.
I
should have fucked her
.

When Maggie got to her room, she hurried into the shower. Her hands were trembling, her heart pounding. She wanted to wash away that weasel’s stench. By the time she finished, she had calmed. Her breathing slowed. And when she walked back into the bedroom, she saw it—a tiny camera with a lens as big as a dime sitting on the bureau below a wall sconce. The lens was cracked, as if somebody had smashed it. She opened her laptop. An image of her in bed lying alongside Stumpf was frozen on the screen. The pervert had recorded them using her computer’s built-in camera. And then she played back the night. But it was she who was the seductress—disrobing, dancing naked, and lasciviously trying to entice him into bed. Who was this woman? It wasn’t her. She had been drugged. But, except for an occasional kiss and a caress, Stumpf did not respond to her invitation. He never responded to her advances. He was clearly doing his best to restrain himself. And it didn’t look easy. The video showed her finally tiring of trying to seduce him. She got into bed and slept. It was only after she had fallen asleep that he had gotten into bed next to her. Nate Stumpf, it seemed, was telling the truth.
Gentlemen
, Maggie thought,
come in strange packages
.

Maggie knocked on Nate Stumpf’s door. She had brought along breakfast. Some cinnamon rolls and coffee. There was no answer. In the lobby, the morning session of the BIOT conference was beginning. Perhaps he was pursuing leads. But he was nowhere to be found. She asked the desk clerk if he had checked out. Apparently not. She spent the next hour sitting by the picture windows overlooking the slopes of Mount Hood. She wondered if she would ever discover the truth of her father’s murder. Having been drugged, it was clear there were people who didn’t want that truth to be known. And now, she had tossed away the one person she discovered she could trust.

And then she saw him. Nate Stumpf, wearing a baggy orange ski bib, was taking ski lessons—falling alongside five-year-olds on the bunny slopes. But he got up and kept trying. She watched as he finally succeeded in completing the short run without falling, raising his arms and his poles in ecstatic triumph. In years to come, Nate Stumpf’s selective and imaginative memory would change that bunny slope achievement into a great slalom victory—and Maggie Wagner would not dispute it.

C
olonel Krantz and Fala reported their conversation with the Iranian mullah in detail to
Aman
. They spoke individually, first with a captain, then a major, and then with a civilian, a psychologist they presumed. The idea was not only to flesh out every detail of what they had seen and been told, but to mine for any discrepancies, lies that is. And then, finally, they met with General Echod again.

“I hate to agree with an Ayatollah,” the general said, biting his lower lip, “but I think he’s right. The Americans are behind this business.”

He handed Krantz some documents detailing the massacre of Islamic rebels on a southern Philippine island.

“The descriptions of the carnage at the battle scene match those from the Hindu Kush. The Americans, they’re not denying their participation,” the general went on, “but they’re busy trying to bury the story and minimize their responsibility.”

“With all their technology,” Krantz asked, “why would the Americans arm their special ops teams with primitive weapons like the Alexander battle scythe? And, considering the size of the weapon, are the soldiers they’re deploying children?”

“I don’t know, Colonel.” Danny Echod shrugged. “But I need to know.”

“General,” Fala said, staring him straight in the eye, probing for a direct answer, “the Americans are your allies. I can’t believe you haven’t simply asked them. I know you have lots of friends in the Pentagon and the American administration.”

“Of course we have asked. But we got nothing. They say we are simply wrong in our assumptions.”

“Do you believe them?”

“We need the Americans,” Echod answered. “But we don’t rely on them for our survival. I believe, more likely, the Americans know. But the information is being closely guarded.”

“But why?” Krantz asked.

“But why?” The general smiled, just a little wickedly. “That is why I have hired you and your lovely lady.”

Although Krantz was feeling a bit jet-lagged, he was a lot more relaxed traveling to the Philippines than to Iran and Pakistan. Israel had had good relations with the Philippines since its founding. In fact, the Philippines was the only Asian nation to support the creation of the Jewish state at the United Nations when the partition resolution was brought to a vote on November 29, 1947. The two countries had had full diplomatic relations since 1957. And, next to the United States, Israel supplied more weaponry to the Filipino army than any other country. There were also more than sixty thousasnd Filipinos working in Israel. With their coming and going over the decades, that meant for a lot of friends.

Krantz found first-class sleeping berths on the Lufthansa flight quite to his liking—and, after a few bourbons and water, he slept well. But Fala was uncomfortable and had abdominal cramps during most of the twenty-two-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Manila. Joshua suggested it was just the long flight. Fala knew the difference. She had had these discomforts before. It was
mittleshmerz
, a nice German medical term for mid-cycle ovulatory pain. The timing meant she was fertile, but it was pain nevertheless. When they arrived at Aquino International Airport in Manila on the morning of the next day, Krantz and Fala were ushered through customs like VIPs and into a waiting limousine.
What a difference a continent makes
, Krantz thought.