London Twist: A Delilah Novella

the camera, and popped out the card. “Here, it’s yours. You can view the pictures on your laptop and do anything you like with them.”
    Fatima smiled reluctantly, but she sat up and pulled the robe close. Even now she was modest, Delilah observed, but that wasn’t so unusual in her experience. She had known many men who could only make love with the lights out and were shy about their bodies even afterward.
    Fatima took the card and opened her laptop. She turned it away from Delilah and typed in what sounded like a long passcode. Then she popped in the card.
    Delilah glanced at her iPhone. It was on the hotel’s Wi-Fi network. So it was already uploading Fatima’s code. The op was done.
    Ordinarily, at a moment like this, she would feel a flush of suppressed elation. But now… a jumble of emotions she didn’t understand. Relief, certainly, that MI6’s horrible Plan B had been rendered moot. But also a strange sadness. And guilt. It didn’t make sense. She needed to get a hold of herself.
    Fatima spun around the laptop so they could both see the screen. She started scrolling through the pictures Delilah took. “I have to admit,” she said, smiling, “you make me look good.”
    They spent some time going through the photos. They were great shots and Delilah pretended to enjoy them. But in fact they were making her feel worse and worse.
    When the candles had burned low, they got in bed. They made love again and lay in each other’s arms for a long time after. But Delilah couldn’t sleep. For maybe the first time in her life, she felt like she’d committed a crime. The nature of the offense eluded her—what she had accomplished here would save lives, she knew that, she always knew that. And she’d likely saved Fatima from horrors she didn’t even want to think about it.
    And then it hit her, so powerful and obvious she realized that until that moment she’d been willing it away. Yes, perhaps she’d saved Fatima from one set of horrors, only to inflict another. Because the most direct, the most immediate consequence of the information she had just acquired would be the violent death of Imran, Fatima’s last brother. The woman had already been brutalized by the loss of her other brothers, and now her shattered world, which she had labored in slow agony to reassemble, would be blown apart again. And her parents’ world, as well.
    Delilah was aware of the irony. Fatima had said how her family’s tragedy continued to haunt even her happiest moments,
especially
her happiest moments. And now, in the afterglow of such a beautiful and moving and unexpected connection, Delilah was haunted, too. And not by a tragedy past. But by one to come. One that she herself had just set in motion. One in which she had used all her guile, all her skills, to make Fatima complicit.
    She knew this was the wrong way to look at it. It was the lives she was saving that mattered. And what was she supposed to do, allow by her inaction for Fatima to be delivered up and be tortured? But no matter how she tried to reason with herself, the horrible guilt persisted. Along with the foreboding sense of punishment to follow.
    • • •
    The trip back was long and felt fraught. Delilah could imagine what Fatima was thinking—some version of what she herself was grappling with. What would they do now? Was it a one-time thing they could attribute to too much wine and leave behind in paradise? Would they stay in touch? Visit each other in their respective cities? Were they friends now? Something more?
    All of which confusion was compounded for Delilah by her knowledge of what their “relationship” had really been about. About the horror that was now in store for Fatima and her family, the horror Delilah had set in inexorable motion.
    She knew she should turn her face away now, not watch what was coming, not see the results. Focus on the lives saved, the trauma prevented.
    But she didn’t want to. She didn’t want it to be over. It was strange. She had never failed to seek an excuse for ending a “relationship” the moment her operational objectives had been achieved. But now she found herself seeking a way to prolong things, instead. It was worse than stupid. It was dangerous. She had to end it. She had gotten what she had come for and her cover offered the perfect excuse to break contact. Now was the moment. She told herself to make it quick, make it clean. Make it over. And to not look back.
    They arrived at Heathrow on a