“You haven’t a principle in your whole body, have you?” she shot back at me. “You’d do anything to try and save your neck. You’d bargain your mother away.”
I shrugged and said nothing.
El Ahmid had watched the little scene, and he spoke out now, his voice taking on a hard edge. “Has your attack of common sense extended to telling me where Karminian hides.”
I nodded. “I don’t know the exact spot,” I said. “But there’s a place south of Casablanca, the black something-or-other.”
“The Black Rocks,” he cut in.
“Yes, that’s the name,” I said. “He’s hiding in that section, inside a small canning factory there.”
It would take them at least a day to discover I’d made up the whole bit. By that time I’d be out of here, or it wouldn’t make any difference anyhow.
“Now how about letting me go?” I asked. “I cooperated with you. You got what you wanted.”
I glanced at Marina. “In fact, you got more than you started out to get.”
“Your childish naïveté surprises me,” El Ahmid said, that sneer of a smile on his face again. He snapped his fingers and two Rifs came forward to grab hold of me. “Take him away,” the Rif leader said.
He felt his jaw gingerly. “I’ll decide how to kill him in the morning. I want to think of something worthwhile for this one.”
As they led me off I cast a quick glance back at the Berber girl.
She was standing to one side, watching El Ahmid start to sweet-talk Marina.
Marina would be all right for a while. He’d treat her with kid gloves for a few days, at least.
El Ahmid had picked a robe from the floor and was putting it around her shoulders.
I shot another glance at the Berber girl and I called out from the doorway.
“Tell him to let me go, Marina,” I said.
The obvious implication of my appeal, that Marina would soon be in a position of influence, did just what I wanted. It was too much for the Berber girl, and I saw her turn and walk off, eyes narrowed in cold fury.
I grinned inwardly. After all these years I ought to know something about dames, I told myself, and female psychology was the same thing in all of them, whether they were from Manhattan or Marrakesh, Paris or Palermo, Athens or Addis Abbaba. I was counting on it to work once again.
I didn’t land in the little cell again. This time it was a large, stone cellar with wall manacles. My wrists were locked into the manacles which kept me in an upright position, arms upraised.
It was a place built to hold many prisoners, but I was the only tenant at the moment. In a far corner I saw something that faintly resembled a wine press, but I knew the stains miming down its sides were not grape juice.
In between watching scarabs, roaches and spiders scurry across the floor, I tried to formulate some kind of plan. Assuming things worked as I’d planned, I’d get out all right but after that what?
There was an American Consulate in Tangier. If I could reach it the AXE high-priority code would get me through to Hawk, and he could take it from there. But that would take time and it would also take me away from the scene.
If the first caravan was due to arrive, and five more on their way, it meant that trouble was ready to erupt, perhaps in a matter of days, even hours.
I had to get word to Hawk and I had to find that tunnel. As I couldn’t be in two places at one time I’d have to depend on Marina.
She wouldn’t give me the time of day right now but that would change quickly enough, I knew. But would she carry through the rest of the way or, once on her own, would she take off and get away from the whole mess? After all, she wasn’t even an American, and her stakes in all this were at best uncertain.
I smiled to myself. I’d give her a stake in it, a very personal stake that few women could resist investigating, at least. After all, she’d only just told me I hadn’t a principle in my whole body. Maybe she was right.
I’d made my decisions and now I occupied my time in quietly straining at the wall manacles, working my wrists back and forth, trying to loosen them from their wall brackets. It was, of course, a pure waste of time, but it passed the day.
A couple of times I had a few visitors, Rif guards who stopped in to check on me. On the other side of the dungeon a small patch of reflected sunlight had lighted up the wall. When it disappeared I knew the day had ended, and little by little the darkness seeped down into the dungeon until I sat in near blackness. The only light was a fitful glow reflected from a wall torch around the corner of the corridor outside.
As the hours went on I was beginning to wonder if perhaps my confidence in the basic essentials of female psychology had been misplaced. I smiled wryly. It would be a hell of a time for it to go wrong.
And then my ears picked up the faint sound, soft footsteps in the darkness. I watched the arched entranceway into the room and saw the slender shape appear, halt and peer about.
“Over here,” I whispered.
