Free The Moses Legacy by Adam Palmer Page B

was, she couldn’t just seek revenge willy-nilly. She had to maintain her professional façade in order to avoid failing the final selection process. But she suspected that her instructors were aware of her intentions and used it to their advantage.
    So she waited patiently until she got the chance to get back at the trainee who had sandbagged her, and when it was delivered on a plate, she grabbed it. It took a while, because the exercise assignments were random. But she knew that despite her self-restraint, their instructors had evidently picked up on her competitive spirit, because in the very last exercise, they had made her former nemesis her designated hunter. And she suspected that this assignment had not been as random as it was supposed to be. However, unlike her arch-enemy, she did know who her hunter was, because when he opened the envelope, he had given himself away by the glint in his eye – as powerful a ‘tell’ as any she had seen.
    From there it had been easy. Just like he had done in the first exercise, she had used a subterfuge: making it seem like she thought another of the class was her hunter, a nerdy type, smart but socially awkward. When the real hunter closed in for the kill, he avoided the obvious trap that he had set for her – and fell into the subtle one instead.
    The trap – the idea for which came from a story she had read – consisted of allowing herself to be captured in her flat. The hunter had persuaded the trainee whom, she appeared to think of as her assigned hunter, to help him. She ‘captured’ the trainee and then her real hunter captured her – or at least thought he had. Certainly he had her tied to a chair, which he meticulously photographed using his still camera and videotaped using hers. But this didn’t surprise her. She knew that he wouldn’t be able to resist rubbing her nose in defeat in a macho display. But the exercise called for her to be ‘delivered’ to their field HQ. Until then, it wasn’t complete.
    However, between the moment she had captured the decoy hunter and the real one captured her, she had taken out a bottle of sparkling wine from the fridge and told the decoy hunter that she was going to drink to celebrate her victory and record it on video. The real hunter had picked the lock and pounced before she could open the bottle. But he made the mistake of assuming that an unopened champagne bottle couldn’t be drugged – or more likely he hadn’t thought about it at all.
    In fact, it is possible to open the bottle, lace it with Rohypnol or GHB and then reseal it. She had not only done this, she had even carefully preserved the foil and re-covered the plastic stopper. And Mr Macho Israeli couldn’t resist the urge to drink her sparkling wine before her eyes and then pour some over her, accompanied by the crude words: ‘I like you wet.’ (He later explained that this was to ‘toughen’ her up to the real world of espionage and was not in any way a representation of his real self.)
    She had wanted to smile, as he had already drunk enough of the drugged sparkling wine. But she held her facial muscles, showing great patience, to maximize her victory. It was only when he held the bottle to her lips and offered her the chance to toast his victory – which she politely declined – that he got his first inkling of what was about to happen.
    â€˜Why don’t you want to be magnanimous in defeat?’ he asked mockingly.
    â€˜You’ve got it wrong,’ she replied. ‘It’s magnanimous in victory; defiant in defeat. Besides, I want to stay awake.’
    That was when he realized. But by then it was too late, he was already feeling the lethargy that precedes unconsciousness. So a few hours later, it was the hunter who was deposited bound and gagged on the floor of the field HQ by a triumphant Sarit. Then, after three days, when his sleeping patterns had