him the slender hash pipe and stood at the foot of the bed, the candle shadows moving behind her.
Lander felt that he was falling into those bottom-less eyes. He remembered as a child lying in the grass on clear summer nights, looking into heavens suddenly dimensional and deep. Looking up until there was no up and he was falling out into the stars.
Dahlia dropped her robe and stood before him.
The sight of her pierced him as it had the first time, and his breath caught in his throat. Dahlia's breasts were large, and their curves were not the curves of a vessel but of a dome, and she had a cleavage even when they were unconfined. Her nipples darkened as they came erect. She was opulent, but not forbidden, her curves and hollows lapped by candlelight.
Lander felt a sweet shock as she turned to take the vessel of sweet oil from above the spirit lamp and the light played over her. Kneeling astride him, she rubbed the warm oil on his chest and belly, her breasts swaying slightly as she worked.
As she leaned forward, her belly rounded slightly and receded again into the dark triangle.
It grew thick and soft and springy up her belly, a black explosion radiating tufts as though it tried to climb. He felt it touch his navel and, looking down, he saw suspended in the whorls like pearls in the candlelight, the first drops of her essence.
It would bathe him he knew, and be warm on his scrotum and it would taste like bananas and salt.
Dahlia took a mouthful of the warm, sweet oil and held him in it, nodding gently, deeply to the rhythm of his blood, her hair spilling warm over him.
And all the while her eyes, wide-set as a puma's and full of the moon, never left his face.
Chapter 3
A sound like a slow roll of thunder shivered the air in the bedroom and the candle flames quivered, but Dahlia and Lander, faced in each other, did not notice it. It was a common sound---that late jet shuttle from New York to Washington. The Boeing 727 was 6,000 feet above Lakehurst and climbing.
Tonight it carried the hunter. He was a broad-shouldered man in a tan suit, and he was seated on the aisle just behind the wing. The stewardess was collecting fares. He handed her a new $50 bill. She frowned at it. "Don't you have anything smaller?"
"For two fares," he said, indicating the big man asleep beside him. "For his and mine." He had an accent the stewardess could not place. She decided he was German or Dutch. She was wrong.
He was Major David Kabakov of the Mossad Aliyah Beth, the Israeli Secret Service, and he was hoping the three men seated across the aisle behind him had smaller bills with which to pay their fare. Otherwise the stewardess might remember them. He should have tended to it in Tel Aviv, he thought. The connection at Kennedy Airport had been too close to permit getting change. It was a small error, but it annoyed him. Major Kabakov had lived to be thirty-seven because he did not make many errors.
Beside him, Sgt. Robert Moshevsky was snoring softly, his head back. On the long flight from Tel Aviv, neither Kabakov nor Moshevsky had given any sign of recognition to the three men behind them, though they had known them for years. The three were burly men with weathered faces, and they wore quiet, baggy suits. They were what the Mossad called a "tactical incursion team." In America they would be called a hit squad.
In the three days since he had killed Hafez Najeer in Beirut, Kabakov had had very little sleep, and he knew that he must give a detailed briefing as soon as he reached the American capital. The Mossad, analyzing the material he brought back from the raid on the Black September leadership, acted instantly when the tape recording was played. There was a hurried conference at the American embassy and Kabakov was dispatched.
It had been clearly understood at the Tel Aviv meeting between American and Israeli intelligence that Kabakov was being sent to the United States to help the Americans determine if a real threat