DELILAH

Delilah is an agent with Mossad.

More specifically she is their top seductress, an incredibly beautiful young woman who possessed not only great beauty and charm but also the inate skill to mold herself into whatever type of woman the intended target was seeking. She could be dominating or fiercely independent. She could be timid or meek. She could be alluring or demure or, and this seemed a specialty of her, both at the same time.

While Delilah, and if a last name was ever given is able to travel anywhere in the world and somehow still make it seem she was on her home turf, her true nesting place was in Paris. There she was not only in her element, she was at home. She had a pleasant apartment in the Le Marais district of the city, not too far from the Seine and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and that served as her base of operations.

She lived and worked out of Paris because while over the years of highly successful work she had helped take down "numerous terrorist financiers and other enablers", she had also "caused a fair amount of trouble". Her intense self-reliance inevitably gave way to chafing at any sort of micro-managing. "For a while, there had been intemperance and acrimony, even some threats. But all that seemed over with now, replaced by a kind of cold peace."

When not on an assignment for Mossad, she maintains a real legend as a local fashion photographer. It was actually "self-sustaining with real clients and real referrals" and it afforded her the largely simple lifestyle she wanted. Her only real indulgence was staying at the best hotels when she traveled. Otherwise, for her less was more.

We first get to know of Delilah from the adventures of the extremely deadly freelance assassin John Rain, a man who also did a lot of work now and then for the CIA. They were both on a job going against an arms dealer in Southeast Asia. Their ad-hoc partnership would morph over a short time into intense attraction and then love and then animosity because she was too independent to be willing to give up her work as a seductress just because she had fallen in love. They would come together, argue, separate for months at a time, and then find their way back to each other.

Delilah is one of the best agents that Mossad, and John Rain, had ever known.

I am like the character John Rain in that I fell for Delilah from the moment I met her. And just like Rain over time I got to see his point about wanting her out of the business out of concern and out of jealousy. I also definitely got her point of view in that this is what she did. She might make her home in France but she is a fervent patriot for her native Israel and whatever it took to keep her country safe, she would do.

The author has done a superb job, in my opinion, of letting us get close - but not too close - to Delilah. As I am sure many of her targets felt before she brought them down, I think I understand her and I know her but perhaps in truth I know only the persona she lets me know. That is what is most seductive about this woman and that is why I hope to see more of her from time to time.