London Twist: A Delilah Novella Read online

  ABOUT LONDON TWIST

  For 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

  EBOOK SETTINGS

  LONDON TWIST

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • REFERENCES • SOURCES • ABOUT THE AUTHOR • CONTACT BARRY

  EBOOK SETTINGS

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  There 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.”

  The Director offered her the grandfatherly smile again. “I understand why you’re upset,” he said. “But would you want to work for an organization so irresponsible it didn’t even concern itself with the behavior of its employees?”

  “I would in fact, yes.”

  The grandfatherly façade faltered. “Well, you don’t.”

  He could have added, “And if you want to, you’re always free to leave.” Apparently, they were sufficiently concerned about that possibility not to risk daring her. She just wished she were daring enough to do it. But then what would she do when she read about the next terror attack, knowing she might have done something to prevent it? How could she live with that?

  The second deputy blew out another noxious cloud of smoke. “If we could have waited, we could have gotten to him abroad. But under the circumstances, we didn’t have the luxury of time. Which meant he had to be gotten to in Riyadh, where he lived. And Riyadh, as you know, is a denied area to us. But, thankfully, not to the British. No questions asked, they put two bullets in Farid’s head as he made his hypocritical way home from the morning prayer service.”

  Other than a sense of mild relief and satisfaction that Farid was dead, Delilah felt nothing. The sex had been part of her job. She was good at her job. Good enough to feel something in the moment. But never after. And thank God for that.

  “No questions asked,” she said. “But a price to be paid.”

  The Director nodded. “Yes.”

  “Paid by me.”

  “It’s not a punishment,” the Director said. “You’re the right person for the job.”

  Actually, she was quite sure, it was both.

  The first deputy took a thumb drive from his shirt pocket and slid it across the table to her. “You’re going to London,” he said. “You’ll liaise with an MI6 operative—”

  “Liaise? This is how you protect my cover?”

  The Director shrugged. “Delilah, this kind of thing is inevitable. The longer you’re in the field, the more your cover gets scraped away. You’ve had an enviable run, a remarkable run, and we’ve all worked hard to keep you in the game. But we were faced with a difficult situation, and MI6 named its price. If we had someone else for it, we would use him. But we don’t. Yes, there’s a risk your cover could be compromised by this operation. But we’re in the risk business. And this is a risk we have to take.”

  She wanted to pick up the thumb drive and fling it in the Director’s face. Instead, she said, “What’s the assignment?”

  The first deputy cleared his throat. “MI6 is hunting a terrorist. And they think his sister is the key.”

  Delilah was confused. “You want me to develop the sister?”

  The first deputy nodded. “Yes.”

  “But she’s a woman.”

  The second deputy stubbed out his cigarette and offered a smile that was more a smirk. “Think of it as a unique challenge. Or a unique opportunity.”

  Delilah ignored his suggestiveness. “But you said I’m the right person for this. I don’t see how that is.”

  The Director said, “The target—Fatima is her name, by the way—has good instincts. Twice MI6 has tried to insert a man. Both British agents of Pakistani extraction, fluent in Urdu, mosque-goers, completely backstopped. Both times she smelled a rat. MI6 needs someone who can get under her radar. Who Fatima won’t see coming.”

  The second deputy smirked again. “Unless you want her to see you coming.”

  Delilah looked at him. “You know what, old man? If I wanted to, I could take your thumb drive and shove it up your nose into your senile brain. You’re lucky I’m not having my period or anything like that. PMS makes me so cranky.”

  The room went silent and the second director’s face grew scarlet. For a moment, Delilah
wondered whether he was having a heart attack. She hoped so.

  “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” he exploded.

  Delilah looked at the Director and the first deputy. “Can you remind your colleague who he is? He seems not to be able to remember. Senile, as I said.”

  “Enough of your insubordination!” the second deputy shouted. “Enough!”

  Delilah found his outburst deeply satisfying, even soothing. He’d lost control of himself. When you’re not in control of yourself, someone else is, and right now they both knew the one in control was her. She smiled at him indulgently, as though he was an amusing, harmless child.

  “Enough,” the second deputy said again. He turned to the Director. “I’ve told you before. She’s disrespectful, insubordinate, and has terrible judgment. Most of all, she’s unreliable. She’s—”

  “Yes, I know,” the Director said, stopping the second deputy with an upturned hand. “And she also produces inarguable results. Your orders, Delilah, are to go to London. You’ll meet your MI6 contact there the day after tomorrow. Details are on the thumb drive. Do you have any questions? If not, this meeting is adjourned.”

  She wondered whether this was a deliberate game of good cop, bad cop. She supposed it didn’t matter. Even if there were some genuine fissures among these men, from her standpoint their differences were much less significant than their similarities.

  She scooped up the thumb drive and dropped it in her purse. “Enjoy your time in Amsterdam, gentlemen,” she said, standing. “I imagine you can find your own way to the red-light district. I’m sure you built in plenty of time for a visit.”

  • • •

  The thumb drive, it turned out, offered not much more than what they’d already told her. Her contact would be waiting for her at ten o’clock at the Coburg Bar of the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair two nights hence. She’d be traveling under her usual freelance photographer cover, and should expect to be in town for some weeks, perhaps longer. They had already rented her a flat in Notting Hill. She barely had time to get back to Paris, pack a bag, and catch a flight to London.