“I’m no good to you now, maybe later.”
“Orange?”
“He’s gone—”
“What?”
“No time. So’s the pig. The subject’s on his way out; he’s in a red-and-blue uniform. Follow him. He’s gone over the edge. Call me at my room, I’ll be there.”
As if in a daze, Evan crossed the Wadi Al Ahd and went directly to the line of shrubbery where he had thrown the plastic shopping bag. Whether it was there or not did not really matter; it was simply that he would feel more comfortable, certainly be able to move more quickly and be less of a target now in the clothes from Masqat. Regardless, he had gone this far; he could not turn back. Only one man, he kept repeating to himself. If he could find him within the parameters of the meeting ground—the Mahdi! He had to find him!
The shopping bag was where he had left it, and the shadows of the shrubbery were adequate for his purpose. Crouching in the deepest bushes, he slowly, article by article, changed clothes. He walked out on the pavement and started west toward the Shaikh Isa Road and the Juma Mosque.
“Itklem,” said Yaakov into the radio while lying on the bed in his unsullied room, towels wrapped tightly around his wounds, warm and lukewarm wet washcloths scattered about the spread.
“It’s G,” said code Gray. “How bad are you?”
“Cuts, mainly. Some loss of blood. I’ll make it.”
“Then you agree that until you do, I take over?”
“That’s the line.”
“I wanted to hear it from you.”
“You’ve heard it.”
“I’ve got to hear something else. With the pig eliminated, do you want us to abort and head back to Masqat? I can force it if your answer’s yes.”
Yaakov stared at the ceiling, the conflicts raging inside him, the scathing words of the American still scalding his ears. “No,” he said haltingly. “He came too far, he risks too much. Stay with him.”
“About W. I’d like to leave him behind. With you, perhaps—”
“He’d never permit it. That’s his ‘son’ out there, remember?”
“You’re right, forget it. I might add he’s impossible.”
“Tell me something I don’t know—”
“I will,” interrupted code Gray. “The subject dropped the uniform and has just passed us across the street. W spotted him. He’s walking like a dead man.”
“He probably is.”
“Out.”
Kendrick changed his mind and his route to the Juma. Instinct told him to stay with crowds on his way to the mosque. After he turned north on the wide Bab Al Bahrain, he would head right at the huge Bab Al Square into the Al Khalifa Road. Thoughts bombarded him, but they were scattered, unconnected, unclear. He was walking into a labyrinth, he knew that, but he also knew that within that maze there would be a man or men watching, waiting for the dead Azra to appear. That was his only advantage, but it was considerable. He knew who and what they were looking for, but they did not know him. He would circle the rendezvous like an earthbound hawk until he saw someone, the right kind of someone, who understood he could lose his life if he failed to bring the crown prince of terrorists to the Mahdi. That man would betray himself, perhaps even stop people to stare into their faces, anxiety growing with each passing minute. Evan would find that someone and isolate him—take him and break him.… Or was he deluding himself, his obsession blinding him? It did not matter any longer, nothing mattered, only one step after another on the hard pavement, weaving his way through the night crowds of Bahrain.
The crowds. He sensed it. Men were crowding around him. A hand touched his shoulder! He spun around and lashed out his arm to break the grip. And suddenly he felt the sharp point of a needle entering his flesh somewhere near the base of his spine. Then there was darkness. Complete.
The telephone jarred Yaakov awake; he grabbed it. “Yes?”
“They’ve got the American!” said code Gray. “More to the point, they exist!”
“Where did it happen? How?”
“That doesn’t matter; I don’t know the streets anyway. What matters is we know where they’ve taken him!”
“You what? How? And don’t tell me that doesn’t matter!”
“Weingrass did it. Damn, it was Weingrass. He knew he couldn’t take it any longer on foot, so he gave a delirious Arab ten thousand dollars for his broken-down taxi! That al harmmee will be drunk for six months! We piled in and followed the subject and saw the whole thing happen. Damn, it was Weingrass!”
“Control your homicidal tendencies,” ordered Yaakov with an uncontrollable smile that vanished quickly. “Where is the subject—shit!—Kendrick being held?”
“In a building called the Sahalhuddin on Tujjar Road—”
“Who owns it?”
“Give us time, Blue. Give Weingrass time. He’s calling in every debt that’s owed him in Bahrain, and I’d hate to think what the Morals Commission in Jerusalem would say if we’re tied in with him.”
“Answer me!”
“Apparently six firms occupy the complex. It’s a matter of narrowing them down—”
“Someone come and get me,” commanded Yaakov.
“So you’ve found the Mahdi, Congressman,” said the darkskinned Arab in a pure white robe and a white silk headdress with a cluster of sapphires on the crown. They were in a large room with a domed ceiling covered with mosaic tiles; the windows were high and narrow, the furniture sparse and all in dark, burnished wood, the huge ebony desk more like an altar or a throne than a functional work surface. There was a mosquelike quality to the room, like the chambers of some high priest of a strange but powerful order in a land removed from the rest of the world. “Are you satisfied now?” continued the Mahdi from behind the desk. “Or possibly disappointed to find that I am a man like you—no, not like you or anyone else—but still a man.”
“You’re a killer, you son of a bitch!” Evan lurched from the thick straight-backed chair, only to be grabbed by two flanking guards and thrown back. “You murdered seventy-eight innocent people—men, women, and children screaming as the building collapsed on them! You’re filth!”
“It was the start of a war, Kendrick. All wars have casualties not restricted to combatants. I submit that I won that very important battle—you disappeared for four years and during those years I made extraordinary progress, progress I might not have made with you here. Or with that abominable Jew, Weingrass, and his flatulent mouth.”
“Manny …? He kept talking about you, warning us!”
“I silence such mouths with a terribly swift sword! You may interpret that as a bullet in their heads.… But when I heard about you, I knew you’d come back because of that first battle four years ago. You led me, as they say, a merry chase until nine hours ago, Amal Bahrudi.”
“Oh?”
“The Soviets are not without men who prefer to be on additional payrolls. Bahrudi, the Euro-Arab, was killed several days ago in East Berlin.… Kendrick’s name surfaces; a dead Arab with blue eyes and pronounced Occidental features is suddenly in Masqat—the equation was imaginative in the extreme, almost unbelievable, but it balanced. You must have had help, you’re not that experienced in these matters.”
Evan stared at the striking face with the high cheekbones and the fired eyes that gazed steadily back at him. “Your eyes,” said Kendrick, shaking his head, pushing away the last effects of the drug administered to him in the street. “That flat mask of a face. I’ve seen you before.”
“Of course you have, Evan. Think.” The Mahdi slowly removed his ghotra, revealing a head of tightly ringleted black hair salted with eruptions of gray. The high, smooth forehead was now emphasized by the dark arched eyebrows; it was the face of a man easily given to obsession, instantly summoning it for whatever purpose it served. “Do you find me in an Iraqi tent? Or perhaps on a podium in a certain Midwest armory?”
“Jesus Christ!” whispered Kendrick, the images coming into focus. “You came to see us in Basrah
seven or eight years ago and told us you’d make us rich if we turned down the job. You said there were plans to break Iran, break the Shah, and you didn’t want any updated airfields in Iraq.”
“It happened. A true Islamic society.”
“Bullshit! You must broker their oil fields by now. And you’re as Islamic as my Scots grandfather. You’re from Chicago—that’s the Midwest armory—and you were thrown out of Chicago twenty years ago because even your own black constituency—which you bled dry—couldn’t take your screaming, fascist crap! You took their millions and came over here to spread your garbage and make millions more. My God, Weingrass knew who the hell you were and he told you to shove it! He said you were slime—two-bit slime, if I remember correctly—and if you didn’t get the hell out of that tent in Basrah, he’d really lose his temper and throw bleach in your face so he could say he only shot a white Nazi!”
“Weingrass is—or was—a Jew,” said the Mahdi calmly. “He vilified me because the greatness he expected eluded him, but it had started to flower for me. The Jews hate success in anyone but their own kind. It’s why they are the agitators of the world—”
“Who the hell are you kidding? He called you one rotten Shvartzeh and it had nothing to do with whites or blacks or anything else! You’re pus and hate, Al Falfa, or whatever you called yourself, and the color of your skin is irrelevant.… After Riyadh—that very important battle—how many others did you kill, did you slaughter?”
“Only what was called for in our holy war to maintain the purity of race, culture and belief in this part of the world.” The lips of the Mahdi from Chicago, Illinois, formed a slow, cold smile.
“You goddamned fucking hypocrite!” shouted Kendrick. Unable to control himself, Evan again lunged out of the chair, his hands like two claws flying across the desk toward the robes of the killer-manipulator. Other hands reached him before he could touch the Mahdi; he was hurled to the floor, kicked simultaneously in his stomach and his spine. Coughing, he tried to get up; while on his knees the guard on the left gripped his hair, yanking back his head as the man on the right held a knife laterally across his throat.
“Your gestures are as pathetic as your words,” said the Mahdi, rising from behind the desk. “We are well on our way to building a kingdom here and there’s nothing the paralyzed West can do about it. We set people against people with forces they cannot control; we divide thoroughly and conquer completely without ourselves firing a shot. And you, Evan Kendrick, have been of great service to us. We have photographs of you taken at the airport when you flew in from Oman; also of your weapons, your false papers and your money belt, the last showing what appears to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have documented proof that you, an American congressman using the name of Amal Bahrudi, managed to get inside the embassy in Masqat, where you killed an eloquent gentle leader named Nassir and later a young freedom fighter called Azra—all during the days of precious truce agreed to by everyone. Were you an agent of your brutal government? How could it be otherwise? A wave of revulsion will spread over the so-called democracies—the fumbling warlike giant has done it again without regard for the lives of its own.”
“You—” Evan leaped up, grabbing the wrist that held the knife, wrenching his head away from the hand that gripped his hair. He was struck in the back of the neck, pummeled again to the floor.
“The executions have been moved up,” continued the Mahdi. “They will resume tomorrow morning—provoked by your insidious activities, which will be made public. Chaos and bloodshed will result, because of the rash, contemptible Americans, until a solution is found, our solution—my solution. But none of this will concern you, Congressman. You will have vanished from the face of the earth, thanks no doubt to your terribly embarrassed government, which is not above punishing traceable failure while issuing feverish denials. There’ll be no corpus delicti, no inkling of your whereabouts whatsoever. Tomorrow, with first light, you’ll be flown out to sea, a bleeding, skinned pig strapped to your naked body, and dropped into the shark-infested shoals of Qatar.”
15
“There’s nothing here!” shouted Weingrass, standing and poring over the papers on the table in the dining room of a Bahrainian official he had known since the Kendrick Group had built an island country club on the archipelago years before. “After all I did for you, Hassan, all the little and not so little fees I passed your way, this is what you give me?”
“More is coming, Emmanuel,” replied the nervous Arab, nervous because Weingrass’s words were heard by Ben-Ami and the four commandos sitting twenty feet away in the Westernized living room on the outskirts of the city. A doctor had been summoned to suture and bandage Yaakov, who refused to lie down; instead, he sat up in an armchair. The man named Hassan glanced at him, mentioning, if only to change the subject of his past with the old architect: “The boy doesn’t look well, Manny.”
“He gets in scraps, what can I tell you? Someone tried to steal his roller skates. What’s coming and when? These are companies, and the products or services they sell. I have to see names, people!”
“That’s what’s coming. It’s not easy to convince the Minister of Industrial Regulations to leave his house at two o’clock in the morning and go down to his office to commit an illegal act.”
“Industrial and regulations in Bahrain are mutually exclusive words.”
“Those are secret papers!”
“A Bahrainian imperative.”
“That’s not true, Manny!”
“Oh, shut up and get me a whisky.”
“You’re incorrigible, my old friend.”
“Tell me about it.” The voice of code Gray drifted out from the living room. He had returned from the telephone, which he had been using with permission but without being questioned every fifteen minutes.
“May I get you something, gentlemen?” asked Hassan, walking through the dining room arch.
“The cardamom coffee is more than sufficient,” answered the older Ben-Ami. “It’s also delicious.”
“There are spirits, if you wish—as, of course, you’ve just gathered from Mr. Weingrass. This is a religious house but we do not impose our beliefs on others.”
“Would you put that in writing, sir?” said code Black, chuckling. “I’ll deliver it to my wife and tell her you’re a mullah. I have to go across the city to have bacon with my eggs.”
“Thank you, but no spirits, Mr. Hassan,” added Gray, slapping Black’s knee. “With luck we’ll have work to do tonight.”
“With greater luck my hands will not be cut off,” said the Arab quietly, heading toward the kitchen. He stopped, interrupted by the sound of the front-door chimes. The high-placed courier had arrived.
Forty-eight minutes later, with computer printouts scattered over the dining room table, Weingrass studied two specific pages, going back and forth from one to the other. “Tell me about this Zareeba, Limited.”
“The name comes from the Sudanese language,” replied the robed official, who had refused to be introduced to anyone. “Roughly, it translates as a protected encampment surrounded by rock or dense foliage.”
“The Sudan …?”
“It’s a nation in Africa—”
“I know what it is. Khartoum.”
“That’s the capital—”
“Heavens, I thought it was Buffalo!” interrupted Weingrass curtly. “How come they list so many subsidiaries?”
“It’s a holding company; their interests are extensive. If a company wishes government licenses for multiple export and import, they’re more easily expedited by the corporate umbrella of a very solid firm.”
“Horseshit.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s Bronx for ‘Oh, good gracious.’ Who runs it?”
“There’s a board of directors—”
“There’s always a board of directors. I asked you who runs it.”
“No one really knows, frankly. The chief executive officer is an amiable fellow—I’ve
had coffee with him—but he doesn’t appear to be a particularly aggressive man, if you know what I mean.”
“So there’s someone else.”
“I wouldn’t know—”
“Where’s the list of directors?”
“Right in front of you. It’s beneath the page on your right.”
Weingrass lifted the page and picked up the one underneath. For the first time in two hours he sat down in a chair, his eyes roaming the list of names over and over again. “Zareeba … Khartoum,” he kept saying quietly, every now and then shutting his eyes tightly, his lined face wrinkled by repeated grimaces, as if he were trying desperately to recall something he had forgotten. Finally, he picked up a pencil and circled a name; then pushed the page across the table to the still-standing, rigid Bahrainian official.
“He’s a black man,” said the high-placed courier.
“Who’s white and who’s black over here?”
“One tells by the features usually. Of course, centuries of Afro-Arab intermingling often obscure the issue.”
“Is it an issue?”
“To some, not most.”
“Where did he come from?”
“If he’s an immigrant, his country of origin is listed there.”
“It says ‘concealed.’ ”
“That generally means the person has fled from an authoritarian regime, usually Fascist or Communist. We protect such people if they contribute to our society. Obviously, he does.”
“Sahibe al Farrahkhaliffe,” said Weingrass, emphasizing each part of the name. “What nationality is that?”
“I’ve no idea. Part African, obviously; part Arab, more obviously. It’s consistent.”
“Wrongo, Buster!” exclaimed Manny, startling everyone in both rooms. “It’s pure American alias-fraud! If this is who I think he is, he’s a black son of a bitch from Chicago who got heaved out by his own people! They got crapped on because he’d banked their money—some twenty million, incidentally—in accommodating banks on this side of the Atlantic. Some eighteen, twenty years ago he was a steamrolling, fire-and-brimstone fanatic called A1 Farrah—his fucking ego wouldn’t let him drop that part of his past, the hallelujah-chorus part. We knew the big gloxinia was on the board of directors of some fat corporation but we didn’t know which one. Besides, we were looking in the wrong direction. Khartoum? Hell! South Side Chicago! Here’s your Mahdi.”