Final words of encouragement given to their fallen colleague, the three fugitives started running up the curving ascent to the flat ground several hundred feet above. The terrain was a combination of dry, scrubby brush weaving over the mostly arid earth and short, gnarled trees encouraged by the night moisture blown in from the sea only to be dwarfed by the windless, blistering heat of day. For as far as their eyes could see in the moon’s dull wash of light, the road was straight. Breathing hard, his barrel chest heaving, Yosef spoke. “Three or four kilometers north there are more trees, taller trees, much more foliage to hide in.”
“You know that?” asked Kendrick, unpleasantly surprised, thinking he was the only one who knew where they were.
“Not this exact road, perhaps, although there are only a few,” answered the blunt, older terrorist, “but they are the same. From the sands toward the Gulf the earth changes. Everything is greener and there are small hills. Suddenly, one is in Masqat. It happens quickly.”
“Yosef was part of the scouting team under Ahbyahd’s command,” explained Azra. “They came here five days before we captured the embassy.”
“I see. I also see that the entire Black Forest couldn’t help us when the light comes up, and Oman isn’t the Schwarzwald. There’ll be troops and police and helicopters combing every inch of ground. There’s no place for us to hide except Masqat.” Evan directed his next words to the man called Blue. “Certainly you have contacts in the city.”
“Numerous.”
“What does that mean?”
“Between ten and twenty, several highly placed. Those fly in and out, of course.”
“Call them together in Masqat and bring me to them. I’ll choose one.”
“You’ll choose one—”
“All I need is one, but it must be the right one. He’ll carry a message for me and I’ll have you in Bahrain in three hours.”
“To the Mahdi?”
“Yes.”
“But you said—you implied—that you don’t know who he is.”
“I don’t.”
“Still, you know how to reach him?”
“No,” answered Kendrick, a sudden hollow pain in his chest. “Another insult but more readily understood. My operations are in Europe, not here. I simply assumed that you knew where to find him in Bahrain.”
“Perhaps it was in the note you destroyed in the Al Kabir, a code—”
“There are always emergency procedures!” broke in Evan harshly, trying to control his anxiety.
“Yes, there are,” said Azra thoughtfully. “But none that ever directly involve the Mahdi. As you must know, his name is spoken in whispers to only a few.”
“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t operate in this part of the world—which was why I was chosen … obviously.”
“Yes, obviously,” agreed Blue. “You are far away from your base, the unexpected messenger.”
“I don’t believe this!” exploded Kendrick. “You receive instructions—no doubt daily, don’t you?”
“We do.” Azra looked briefly at Yosef. “But like yourself I am a messenger.”
“What?”
“I am a member of the council, and young and strong, and not a woman. But neither am I a leader; my years do not permit it. Nassir, my sister Zaya, and Ahbyahd—they were appointed the leaders of the council. Until Nassir’s death the three of them shared responsibility for the operation. When sealed instructions came, I delivered them but I did not break the seals. Only Zaya and Ahbyahd know how to reach the Mahdi—not personally, of course, but through a series of contacts that lead to him, get word to him.”
“Can you make radio contact with your sister—over a secure frequency or perhaps a sterile telephone? She’d give you the information.”
“Impossible. The enemy’s scanning equipment is too good. We say nothing on the radio or the telephone that we would not say in public; we must assume it’s one and the same.”
“Your people in Masqat!” continued Evan rapidly, emphatically, feeling the beads of perspiration on his hairline. “Could one of them go inside and bring it out?”
“Information concerning the Mahdi, no matter how remote?” asked Azra. “She’d execute the one who sought it.”
“We’ve got to have it! I’m to bring you to Bahrain—to him—by tonight, and I won’t risk our sources of operating funds in Europe because I’m held responsible for a failure here that isn’t mine!”
“There is only one solution,” said Azra. “The one I spoke of below. We go to the embassy, into the embassy.”
“There’s no time for such complications!” insisted Kendrick desperately. “I know Bahrain. I’ll choose a location and we’ll call one of your people here to get the word inside to your sister. She or Ahbyahd will find a way to reach one of the Mahdi’s contacts. There can’t be any mention of either of us, of course—we’ll have them say an emergency has arisen. That’s it, an emergency; they’ll know what it means! I’ll fix the meeting ground. A street, a mosque, a section of the piers or the outskirts of the airport. Someone will come. Someone has to!”
The lean, muscular young terrorist once more was silent as he studied the face of the man he believed to be his counterpart in far-off Europe. “I ask you, Bahrudi,” he said after the better part of ten seconds. “Would you be so free, so undisciplined, with your financial sources in Berlin? Would Moscow, or the Bulgarian banks in Sofia, or the unseen money in Zagreb tolerate such loose communications?”
“In an emergency they would understand.”
“If you allowed such an emergency, they would slit your throat with a shearing knife and replace you!”
“You take care of your sources and I’ll take care of mine, Mr. Blue.”
“I will take care of mine. Here, now. We go to the embassy!”
The winds from the Gulf of Oman swept over the scrubby grass and the gnarled, dwarfed trees, but they could not prohibit the sound of the persistent two-note siren in the distance coming up from the desert valley. It was the signal. Conceal yourselves. Kendrick expected it.
“Run!” roared Yosef, grabbing Azra’s shoulder and propelling his superior forward on the road. “Run, my brothers, as you have never run before in your lives!”
“The embassy!” cried the man called Blue. “Before the light comes up!”
For Evan Kendrick, congressman from the Ninth District of Colorado, the nightmare that would live with him the rest of his life was about to begin.
9
Khalehla gasped. Her eyes had been suddenly drawn to the rearview mirror—a speck of light, an image of black upon darker black, something. And then it was there. Far away on the hill above Masqat, a car was following her! There were no headlights, just a dark, moving shadow in the distance. It was rounding a curve on the deserted road that led to the twisting descent into the valley—to the beginning of the sands of Jabal Sham where the “escape” was to take place. There was only one entrance to and one exit from the desert valley, and her strategy had been to drive off the road out of sight and follow Evan Kendrick and his fellow fugitives on foot once they had broken out of the van. That strategy was now void.
Oh, my God, I can’t be caught! They’ll kill every hostage in the embassy! What have I done? Get out. Get away!
Khalehla spun the wheel; the powerful car swung around on the soft, sandy earth, leaping over ruts on the primitive road, and reversing its direction. She slammed her foot on the accelerator, stabbing it into the floor, and within moments, her headlights on high beam, she passed the sedan now rushing toward her. A figure beside the astonished driver tried to lunge down, concealing his face and body, but it was impossible.
And Khalehla did not believe what she saw!
But then she had to. In a sudden moment of utter clarity she saw it was so right, so perfect—so unmistakably perfect. Tony! Fumbling, bumbling, inarticulate Anthony MacDonald. The company reject whose position was secure because the firm was owned by his wife’s father but who was nevertheless s
ent to Cairo, where he could do the least damage. A representative without portfolio, other than hosting dinner parties where he and his equally inept and boring wife invariably got drunk. It was as though a company memorandum had been tattooed on their foreheads: Not permitted in the U.K. except for obligatory family funerals. Return flight tickets mandatory. How perfectly ingenious! The overweight, overindulged, underbrained fop in sartorial plumage that could not hide his excesses. The Scarlet Pimpernel could not have matched his cover, and it was a cover, Khalehla was convinced of it. In building one for herself she had forced a master to expose his own.
She tried to think back, to reconstruct how he had snared her, but the steps were blurred because she had not thought about it at the time. She had no reason whatsoever to doubt that Tony MacDonald, the alcoholic cipher, was beside himself at the thought of traveling to Oman alone without someone knowledgeable with him. He had complained several times, nearly trembling, that his firm had accounts in Masqat and he was expected to service them despite the horrors going on over there. She had replied—several times—with comforting words that it was basically a U.S.-Israeli problem, not a British one, so he would not be harmed. It was as though he had expected her to be sent there, and when the orders came she had remembered his fears and telephoned him, believing he was her perfect escort to Oman. Oh, just perfect!
My God, what a network he must have! she thought. A little over an hour ago he was supposedly paralyzed with alcohol, making an ass of himself in a hotel bar, and here he was at five o’clock in the morning following her in a large blacked-out sedan. One assumption was unavoidable: he had put her under twenty-four-hour surveillance and picked her up after she had driven out of the palace gate, which meant that his informers had unearthed her connection to the sultan of Oman. But for whom was the profoundly clever MacDonald playing out his charade, a cover that gave him access to an efficient Omani network of informers and drivers of powerful automobiles at any hour of the day and night in this besieged country where every foreigner was put under a microscope? Which side was he on, and if it was the wrong one, for how many years had the ubiquitous Tony MacDonald been playing his murderous game?
Who was behind him? Did this contradictory Englishman’s visit to Oman have anything to do with Evan Kendrick? Ahmat had spoken cautiously, abstractly, about the American congressman’s covert objective in Masqat but would not elaborate other than to say that no theory should be overlooked no matter how implausible it seemed. He revealed only that the former construction engineer from Southwest Asia believed that the bloody seizure of the embassy might be traced to a man and an industrial conspiracy whose origins were perceived four years ago in Saudi Arabia—perceived, not proven. It was far more than she had been told by her own people. Yet an intelligent, successful American did not risk going undercover among terrorists without extraordinary convictions. For Ahmat, sultan of Oman and fan of the New England Patriots, this was enough. Beyond routing him here, Washington would not acknowledge him, would not help him. “But we can, I can!” Ahmat had exclaimed. And now Anthony MacDonald was a profoundly disturbing factor in the terrorist equation.
Her professional instincts demanded that she walk away, race away, but Khalehla could not do that. Something had happened, someone had altered the delicate balances of past and impending violence. She would not call for a small jet to fly her out of an unknown rock-based plateau to Cairo. Not yet. Not yet. Not now! There was too much to learn and so little time! She could not stop!
* * *
“Don’t stop!” roared the obese MacDonald, clutching the hand strap above his seat as he yanked his heavy body upright in the sedan. “She was driving out here for a reason, certainly not for pleasure at this hour.”
“She may have seen you, Effendi.”
“Not likely, but if she did I’m merely a buggered-off client tricked by a whore. Keep going and switch on your lights. Someone may be waiting for them and we have to know who it is.”
“Whoever it is may be unfriendly, sir.”
“In which case I’m just another drunken infidel you’ve been hired by the firm to protect from his own outrageous behavior. No different from other times, old sport.”
“As you wish, Effendi.” The driver turned on the headlights.
“What’s up ahead?” asked MacDonald.
“Nothing, sir. Only an old road that leads down to the Jabal Sham.”
“What the hell is that?”
“The start of the desert. It ends with the far-off mountains that are the Saudi borders.”
“Are there other roads?”
“A number of kilometers to the east and less passable, sir, very difficult.”
“When you say there’s nothing up ahead, exactly what do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said, sir. Only the road to the Jabal Sham.”
“But this road, the one we’re on,” pressed the Englishman. “Where does it go?”
“It does not, sir. It turns left into the road down to the—”
“This Jabal-whatever,” completed MacDonald, interrupting. “I see. So we’re not talking about two roads, but one that happens to head left down to your bloody desert.”
“Yes, sir—”
“A rendezvous,” broke in the Mahdi’s conduit, whispering to himself. “I’ve changed my mind, old boy,” he continued quickly. “Douse the damned headlights. There’s enough of a moon for you to see, isn’t there?”
“Oh, yes!” replied the driver in minor triumph while turning off the lights. “I know this road very well. I know every road in Masqat and Matrah very, very well. Even the unpassable ones to the east and to the south. But I must say, Effendi, I do not understand.”
“Quite simple, my boy. If our busy little whore didn’t head down to whatever and whomever she intended to reach, someone else will come up here—before the light does, I expect, which won’t be too long now.”
“The sky brightens quickly, sir.”
“Quite so.” MacDonald placed his pistol on top of the dashboard, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a short pair of binoculars with bulging, thickly coated lenses. He brought them to his eyes and scanned the area ahead through the windshield.
“It is still too dark to see, Effendi,” said the driver.
“Not for these little dears,” explained the Englishman as they approached another curve in the dim moonlight. “Black out the entire sky and I’ll count you the number of those stubby trees a thousand meters away.” They rounded the sharp curve, the driver squinting and braking the large sedan. The road was now straight and flat, disappearing into the darkness ahead.
“Another two kilometers and we reach the descent into the Jabal Sham, sir. I will have to go very slowly, as there are many turns, many rocks—”
“Good Christ!” roared MacDonald, peering through the infrared binoculars. “Get off the road! Quickly!”
“What, sir?”
“Do as I say! Cut your engine!”
“Sir?”
“Turn it off! Coast as far as you can into the sand grass!”
The driver swung the car to the right, lurching over the hard, rutted ground, gripping the wheel and spinning it repeatedly to avoid the scattered squat trees barely seen in the night light. Seventy-odd feet into the grass the sedan came to a jolting stop; an unseen, gnarled tree close to the ground had been caught in the undercarriage.
“Sir …?”
“Be quiet!” whispered the obese Englishman, replacing the binoculars in his pocket and reaching for his weapon above the dashboard. With his free hand he grabbed the door handle, then abruptly stopped. “Do the lights go on when the door is opened?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” answered the driver, pointing to the roof of the car. “The overhead light, sir.”
MacDonald smashed the barrel of his pistol into the glass of the ceiling light. “I’m going outside,” he said, again whispering. “Stay here, stay still and stay the hell away from the damned horn. If I hear a sound you?
??re a dead man, do you understand me?”
“Clearly, sir. In case of an emergency, however, may I ask why?”
“There are men on the road up ahead—I couldn’t say whether three or four; they were just specks—but they’re coming this way and they’re running.” Silently the Englishman opened the door and rapidly, uncomfortably, climbed out. Staying as close to the ground as possible, he made his way swiftly across the sand grass to within twenty feet of the road. In his dark suit and black silk shirt, he lowered his bulk beside the stub of a dwarfed tree, put his weapon to the right of the twisted trunk, and took the infrared binoculars out of his pocket. He trained them on the road, in the path of the approaching figures. Suddenly they were there.
Blue! It was Azra. Without his beard but unmistakable! The junior member of the council, brother of Zaya Yateem, the only set of brains on that council. And the man on his left … MacDonald could not recall the name, but he had studied the photographs as though they were his passage to infinite wealth—which they were—and he knew it was he. A Jewish name, an older man, a terrorist for nearly twenty years … Yosef? Yes, Yosef! Trained in the Libyan forces after fleeing the Golan Heights.… But the man on Azra’s left was puzzling; because of his appearance the Englishman felt he should know him. Focusing the infrared lenses on the bouncing, rushing face, MacDonald was perplexed. The running man was nearly as old as Yosef, and the few people in the embassy over thirty years of age were basically there for a reason known to Bahrain; the remainder were imbeciles and hotheads—fundamentalist zealots easily manipulated. Then MacDonald noticed what he should have seen at first: the three men were in prison clothes. They were escaped prisoners. Nothing made sense! Were these the men the whore, Khalehla, was racing to meet? If so, everything was doubly incomprehensible. The bitch-whore was working for the enemy out of Cairo. The information was confirmed in Bahrain; it was irrefutable! It was why he had cultivated her, repeatedly telling her of his firm’s interests in Oman and how frightened he was to go there under the circumstances and how grateful he would be for a knowledgeable companion. She had swallowed the bait, accepting his offer, even to the point of insisting that she could not leave Cairo until a specific day, a specific time, which meant a very specific flight, of which there was only one a day. He had phoned Bahrain and was told to comply. And watch her, which he did. There was no meeting with anyone, no hint of eye contact whatsoever. But in the chaos of Masqat’s security-conscious immigration she had strayed away. Damn! Damn! She had wandered—wandered—out to the air-freight warehouse, and when he found her she was alone by her petulant self. Had she made contact with someone there, passed instructions to the enemy? And if she had, did either have anything to do with the escaped prisoners now racing up the road?