It was as if an unseen veil had been lifted off the Arab woman’s face, a lovely, striking face, thought Evan as he studied the large brown eyes that held such care and curiosity in them. Still, he swore silently at himself for being the amateur, not knowing who was real and who was false! Between eleven-thirty and midnight. That was the zero hour, the thirty-minute span when he would catch a link, the link to the Mahdi. Could he trust this terribly efficient female who told him only so much and no more? Then again, could he do it himself? She had the triple-five number … how did she get it? Suddenly, the room started to spin around, the sunlight through the windows became a sprayed burst of orange. Where were the windows?
“No, Kendrick!” shouted Khalehla. “Not now! Don’t collapse now! Make the call, I’ll help you! Your friend must know that everything is all right! He’s a terrorist in Bahrain! He has nowhere to go—you must make the call!”
Evan felt the hard slaps against his face, the harsh, stinging blows that rushed the blood to his head, his head that was suddenly cradled in Khalehla’s right arm as her left hand reached for a glass on the bedside table. “Drink this!” she commanded, holding the glass to his lips. He did so. The liquid exploded in his throat.
“Jesus!” he roared.
“A hundred-and-twenty-proof vodka and brandy,” said Khalehla smiling, still holding him. “It was given to me by a British MI-Sixer named Melvyn. ‘Get someone to have three of these and you can sell him a gross of anything on the rack,’ that’s what Melvyn told me. Can I sell you something, Congressman? Like a phone call?”
“I’m not buying. I don’t have any money. You’ve got it.”
“Make that call, please,” said Khalehla, releasing her prisoner as she retreated to the gold-rimmed dressing-table chair. “I think it’s terribly important.”
Kendrick shook his head, trying to focus on the telephone. “I don’t know the number.”
“I have it here.” Khalehla reached into the pocket of her flight jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. “The number is five-nine-five-nine-one.”
“Thank you, madame secretary.” Evan reached for the phone, feeling a thousand aches in his body as he bent over and picked it up, pulling it to his lap. The exhaustion was spreading through him; he could barely move, barely dial. “Azra?” he said, hearing the terrorist’s voice. “Have you studied the map of Manamah? Good. I’ll pick you up at the hotel at ten o’clock.” Kendrick paused, darting his eyes up at Khalehla. “If for any reason I’m delayed, I’ll meet you in the street at the north end of the Juma Mosque where it joins the Al Khalifa Road. I’ll find you. Understood? Good.” Kendrick, trembling, hung up the phone.
“You have one more call to make, Congressman.”
“Give me a couple of minutes.” Kendrick leaned back on the pillows. God, he was tired!
“You really should make it now. You must tell Ahmat where you are, what you’ve done, what is happening. He expects it. He deserves to hear it from you, not me.”
“All right, all right.” With enormous effort, Evan sat forward and picked up the phone, which was still on the bed. “It’s direct dialing here in Bahrain. I forgot. What’s the code for Masqat?”
“Nine-six-eight,” replied Khalehla. “Dial zero-zero-one first.”
“I should reverse the goddamned charges,” said Kendrick, dialing, barely able to see the numbers.
“When did you last sleep?” asked Khalehla.
“Two—three days ago.”
“When did you eat last?”
“Can’t remember.… How about you? You’ve been pretty busy yourself, Madame Not-Such-a-Butterfly.”
“I can’t remember, either.… Oh, yes, I did eat. When I left the el Shari el Mishkwiyis, I stopped at that awful bakery in the square and got some orange baklava. More to find out who was there than anything—”
Evan held up his hand; the sultan’s buried private line was ringing.
“Iwah?”
“Ahmat, it’s Kendrick.”
“I’m relieved!”
“I’m pissed off.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
“Her? Who?”
Evan handed the phone to a startled Khalehla.
“It’s me, Ahmat,” she said, embarrassed. Eight seconds later, after the voice of the perplexed and angry young sultan could be heard across the room, Khalehla continued. “It was either this or having the press learn that an American congressman armed with fifty thousand dollars on him had flown into Bahrain without going through customs. How long would it be before it was learned that he flew in on a plane ordered by the royal house of Oman? And how soon after that would there be speculation about his mission in Masqat?… I used your name with a brother of the Emir I’ve known for years and he arranged a place for us.… Thank you, Ahmat. Here he is.”
Kendrick took the phone. “She’s a biscuit, my old-young friend, but I suppose I’m better off here than where I might be. Just don’t give me any more surprises, okay?… Why are you so quiet?… Forget it, here’s the schedule and, remember, no interference unless I ask for it! I’ve got our boy from the embassy at the Aradous Hotel; and the MacDonald situation, which I assume you know about—” Khalehla nodded, and Evan continued rapidly, “I gather you do. He’s being monitored at the Tylos; we’ll be given a list of the calls he’s been making when he stops making them. Incidentally, they’re both armed.” Exhausted, Kendrick then described the specifics of the meeting ground as they had been relayed to the agents of the Mahdi. “We only need one, Ahmat, one man who can lead us to him. I’ll personally turn the rack until we get the information because I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Kendrick hung up the phone and fell back onto the pillows.
“You need food,” said Khalehla.
“Send out for Chinese,” said Evan. “You’ve got the fifty thousand, not me.”
“I’ll have the kitchen prepare you something.”
“Me?” His lids half closed, Kendrick looked at the olive-skinned woman in the ridiculously rococo gold-rimmed chair. The whites of her dark brown eyes were bloodshot, the sockets blue from exhaustion, the lines of her striking face far more pronounced than her age called for. “What about you?”
“I don’t matter. You do.”
“You’re about to fall out of that Lilliputian throne of yours, Queen Mother.”
“I’ll handle it, thank you,” said Khalehla, sitting upright, blinking in defiance.
“Since you won’t give me my watch, what time is it?”
“Ten minutes past four.”
“Everything’s in place,” said Evan, swinging his legs out onto the floor under the sheet, “and I’m sure this garishly civilized establishment can accommodate a wake-up call. ‘Rest is a weapon,’ I read that once. Battles have been won and lost more through sleep and the lack of sleep than firepower.… If you’ll modestly look away, I’ll grab a towel from what I assume is the largest bathroom in Bahrain over there, and find myself another bed.”
“We can’t leave this room except to leave the house.”
“Why not?”
“Those are the arrangements. The Emir doesn’t care for his cousin’s young wife; therefore, the defilement caused by your person is restricted to her quarters. There are guards outside to enforce the order.”
“I don’t believe this!”
“I didn’t make up the rules, I simply got you a place to stay.”
His eyes closing, Kendrick rolled back on the bed and over to the far side, holding up the sheet to negotiate the distance. “All right, Miss Cairo. Unless you want to keep slipping off that silly-looking chair or fall flat on your face on the floor, here’s your siesta pad. Before you relent, two things: Don’t snore, and make sure I’m up by eight-thirty.”
Twenty agonizing minutes later, unable to keep her eyes open and having fallen off the chair twice, Khalehla crept into the bed.
The incredible happened, in
credible because neither expected it, nor was it sought, nor had either remotely considered the possibility. Two frightened, exhausted people felt each other’s presence and, more asleep than awake, drew closer, at first touching, then slowly, haltingly, reaching, finally holding, grasping at each other; swollen, parted lips seeking, searching, desperately needing the moist contact that promised release from their fears. They made love in a burst of frenzy—not as strangers imitating animals, but as a man and a woman who had communicated, and somehow knew that there had to be a touch of warmth, of comfort, in a world gone mad.
“I suppose I should say I’m sorry,” said Evan, his head on the pillows, his chest heaving as if he were swallowing his last breath of air.
“Please don’t,” said Khalehla quietly. “I’m not sorry. Sometimes … sometimes we all need to be reminded that we’re part of the human race. Weren’t those your words?”
“In a different context, I think.”
“Not really. Not when you really think about it.… Go to sleep, Evan Kendrick. I won’t say your name again.”
“What does that mean?”
“Go to sleep.”
Three hours later, nearly to the minute, Khalehla got out of the bed, picked up her clothes from the white carpet and, glancing at the unconscious American, quietly dressed. She wrote a note on a sheet of royal stationery and placed it on the bedside table next to the phone. She then went to the dressing table, opened a drawer and removed Kendrick’s possessions, including the gun, the knife, the watch and his money belt. She put everything on the floor by the bed except the half-used pack of American cigarettes, which she crushed and shoved into her pocket. She crossed to the door and silently let herself out.
“Esmah!” she whispered to the uniformed Bahrainian guard, telling him in a single word to heed her orders. “He is to be awakened at precisely eight-thirty. I myself will reach this royal house to see that it is done. Do you understand?”
“Iwah, iwah!” replied the guard, stiff-necked and nodding his head in obedience.
“There may be a phone call for him, asking for ‘the visitor.’ It’s to be intercepted, the information written down, placed in an envelope, and shoved under the door. I’ll clear it with the authorities. They’re just names and telephone numbers of people doing business with his firm. Understood?”
“Iwah, iwah!”
“Good.” Khalehla gently, pointedly placed Bahrainian dinars worth fifty American dollars into the guard’s pocket. He was hers for a lifetime, or at least for five hours. She walked down the ornate curved staircase to the enormous foyer and the carved front door, which was opened by another guard bowing obsequiously. She went out on the bustling pavement, where robes and dark business suits rushed in both directions, and looked for a public telephone. She saw one on the corner and ran toward it.
“This call will be accepted, I assure you, Operator,” said Khalehla, having given the numbers she had been instructed to give in an extreme emergency.
“Yes?” The voice five thousand miles away was harsh, abrupt.
“My name is Khalehla. You’re the one I was to reach, I believe.”
“No one else. The operator said ‘Bahrain.’ Do you confirm it?”
“Yes. He’s here. I’ve been with him for several hours.”
“What’s going down?”
“There’s a meeting between eleven-thirty and midnight near the Juma Mosque and the Al Khalifa Road. I should be there, sir. He’s not equipped; he can’t handle it.”
“No way, lady!”
“He’s a child where these people are concerned! I can help!”
“You can also involve us, which is out of the question and you know it as well as I do! Now, get out of there!”
“I thought you’d say that … sir. But may I please explain what I consider to be the negative odds of the equation in this particular operation?”
“I don’t want to hear any of that spook bullshit! Get out of there!”
Khalehla winced as Frank Swann slammed down the telephone in Washington, D.C.
“The Aradous and the Tylos, I know them both,” said Emmanuel Weingrass into the phone in the small secure office at the airport in Muharraq. “T. Farouk and Strickland—good God, I can’t believe it! That daffodil drunk from Cairo?… Oh, sorry, Stinker, I forgot. I mean that French lilac from Algiers, that’s what I meant to say. Go on.” Weingrass wrote down the information from Masqat, given by a young man for whom he was beginning to have enormous respect. He knew men twice Ahmat’s age and with three times his experience who would have buckled under the stress the sultan of Oman was enduring, not excluding the outrageous Western press that had no concept of his courage. The courage for risks that could bring about his downfall and his death. “Okay, I’ve got it all.… Hey, Stinker, you’re quite a guy. You grew up to be a real mensch. Of course, you probably learned it all from me.”
“I learned one thing from you, Manny, a very important truth. That was to face things as they were and not to make excuses. Whether it was for fun or in pain, you said. You told me a person could live with failure but not with the excuses that took away his right to fail. It took me a long time to understand that.”
“That’s very nice of you, young fellow. Pass it on to the kid I read you’re expecting. Call it the Weingrass addendum to the Ten Commandments.”
“But, Manny—”
“Yes?”
“Please don’t wear one of those yellow or red polka-dotted bow ties in Bahrain. They kind of mark you, you know what I mean?”
“Now you’re my tailor?… I’ll be in touch, mensch. Wish us all good hunting.”
“I do, my friend. Above all, I wish I could be with you.”
“I know that. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know it—if our friend didn’t know it.” Weingrass hung up the phone and turned to the six men behind him. They were perched on tables and chairs, several holding their small secondary side arms, others checking the battery charges in their hand-held radios, all watching and listening intently to the old man. “We split up,” he said. “Ben-Ami and Gray will come with me to the Tylos. Blue, you take the others to the Aradous Hotel—” Manny stopped, gripped by a sudden coughing seizure; his face reddened and his slender frame shook violently. Ben-Ami and the members of the Masada unit glanced at one another; none moved, each knowing instinctively that Weingrass would rebuff any assistance. But one thing was clear to all of them. They were looking at a dying man.
“Water?” asked Ben-Ami.
“No,” replied Manny curtly, the coughing seizure subsiding. “Lousy chest cold, lousy weather in France.… All right, where were we?”
“I was to take the others to the Aradous Hotel,” answered Yaakov, code name Blue.
“Get yourselves some decent clothes so you won’t get thrown out of the lobby. There are shops here in the airport, clean jackets will be enough.”
“These are our working clothes,” objected Black.
“Paper-bag ’em,” said Weingrass.
“What are we to do at the Aradous?” Blue got off the table he was sitting on.
Manny looked down at his notes, then up at the young leader. “In Room Two-zero-one is a man who’s called Azra.”
“Arabic for ‘blue,’ ” interrupted code Red, glancing at Yaakov.
“He’s on the terrorist council in Masqat,” broke in Orange. “They say he led the team that stormed the Teverya kibbutz near the Galilee, killing thirty-two, including nine children.”
“He planted bombs in three settlements on the West Bank,” added Gray, “and blew up a pharmacy, paint-spraying the name ‘Azra’ on a wall. After the blast the wall was pieced together like a puzzle, and there it was. The name Azra. I’ve seen him on television.”
“Pig,” said Yaakov quietly, adjusting the straps of his weapon under the jacket. “When we get to the Aradous, what do we do? Give him tea and cakes or just a medal for humanitarianism?”
“You stay out of his sight!” replied Weingrass
harshly. “But don’t let him out of yours. Two of you get rooms near his; watch the door. Don’t get a glass of water, don’t go to the toilet, just watch his door every minute. The two others take up positions in the street, one in front, the other by the employees’ exit. Stay in radio contact with each other. Work out simple codes, one-word codes—in Arabic. If he moves, you move with him, but don’t let him suspect for even a moment that you’re there. Remember, he’s as good as you are; he’s had to survive, too.”
“Are we silently escorting him to a private dinner party?” asked code Blue sarcastically. “This is a plan without the most rudimentary blueprint!”
“The blueprint will come from Kendrick,” said Manny, for once not rising to the insult. “If he really has one,” he added softly, concern in his voice.
“What?” Ben-Ami rose from his chair, not, however, in anger but in astonishment.
“If everything goes according to schedule, he’ll pick up the Arab at ten o’clock. With his Masqat terrorist in tow, he expects to make contact with one of the Mahdi’s agents, someone who can lead them either to the Mahdi himself or to someone else who can.”
“On what basis?” asked the incredulous Ben-Ami from the Mossad.
“Actually, it’s not bad. The Mahdi’s people think there’s an emergency, but they don’t know what it is.”
“An amateur!” roared code Red of the Masada unit. “There’ll be backups, and blind drones, and backups for them. What the hell are we doing here?”
“You’re here to take out the backups and the drones and the backups behind them!” shouted Weingrass in reply. “If I have to tell you what to look for, go back and start all over again with the Boy Scouts in Tel Aviv. You follow; you protect; you take out the bad guys. You clear a path for that amateur who’s putting his life on the line. This Mahdi’s the key, and if you haven’t understood that by now, there’s nothing I can do about it. One word from him, preferably with a gun to his head, and everything stops in Oman.”
“It’s not without merit,” said Ben-Ami.