Kendrick leaned forward in Dennison’s chair, his elbows on the desk. He stared at the far wall of the office, conflicting thoughts racing through his mind. Khalehla, born Adrienne Rashad, had saved his life, but had she saved it only to sell him? She was also a close friend of Ahmat, who could be damaged by his association with her, and Evan had hurt the young sultan enough without adding a turned intelligence agent to the list. Yet Khalehla had understood him when he needed understanding; she was kind when he needed kindness because he was so afraid—both for his life and for his inadequacies. If she had been tricked into revealing him and he exposed her ineptness, she was finished in a job she intensely believed in.… Yet if she had not been tricked, if for reasons of her own she had exposed him—then all he would expose was her betrayal. Which was the truth? Dupe or liar? Whichever it was, he had to find out for himself without the specter of official scrutiny. Above all, dupe or liar, he had to know whom she had reached or who had reached her. For only the “who” could answer the “why” he had been exposed as Evan of Oman. And that he had to learn! “Then out of the seven of you, there’s only one unaccounted for.”
“The woman,” agreed Dennison, nodding his head. “I’ll put her on a revolving spit over the hottest goddamn fire you ever saw.”
“No, you won’t,” countered Kendrick. “You and your people won’t get near her until I give you the word—if I give it. And we’re going to go one step further. No one’s to know you’re flying her back here—under cover, I think is the term. Absolutely no one. Is that understood?”
“Who the hell are you—”
“We’ve been through this, Herbie. Remember next Tuesday in the Blue Room? With the Marine Band and all those reporters and television cameras? I’ll have a great big platform to climb on if I want to and express a few opinions. Believe me, you’ll be among the first targets, decked ass and all.”
“Shit! May the one being blackmailed be so bold as to ask why this female spook gets preferred treatment?”
“Sure,” replied Evan, his gaze settled on the chief of staff. “That woman saved my life and you’re not going to ruin hers by letting her own people know you’ve got her under your well-advertised White House shotgun. You’ve done enough of that around here.”
“All right, all right! But let’s get one thing clear. If she’s the sieve, you turn her over to me.”
“That’ll depend,” said Kendrick, sitting back.
“On what, for Christ’s sake?”
“On the how and the why.”
“More riddles, Congressman?”
“Not for me,” answered Evan, suddenly rising from the chair. “Get me out of here, Dennison. Also, since I can’t go home, either to my house in Virginia or even out to Colorado, without being swamped, can someone in this booby hatch rent me a lodge or a cabin in the country under another name? I’ll pay for a month or whatever’s necessary. I just want a few days to figure things out before I go back to the office.”
“It’s been taken care of,” said the chief of staff abruptly. “Actually, it was Jennings’s idea—to put you on ice over the weekend in one of those sterile houses in Maryland.”
“What the hell is a sterile house? Please use language I can understand.”
“Let’s put it this way. You’re the guest of the President of the United States in a place no one can find that is reserved for people we don’t want found. It dovetailed with my considered opinion that Langford Jennings should make the first public statements about you. You’ve been seen here, and as sure as rabbits have little rabbits the word’ll get out.”
“You’re the scenario writer. What do we say—what do you say, since I’m in isolation?”
“That’s easy. Your safety. It’s the President’s primary concern after conferring with our counterterrorist experts. Don’t worry, our writers will come up with something that’ll make the women cry into their handkerchiefs and the men want to go out and march in a parade. And since Jennings has the last word in these things, it’ll probably include some whacked-up image of a powerful knight of the Round Table looking after a brave younger brother who carried out a joint dangerous mission. Shit!”
“And if there’s any truth to the reprisal theory,” added Kendrick, “it’ll make me a target.”
“That’d be nice,” agreed Dennison, nodding again.
“Call me when you’ve made arrangements for the Rashad woman.”
Evan sat in the leather lounge chair in the study of the impressive sterile house on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the township of Cynwid Hollow. Outside, within the walls of the floodlit grounds, guards moved in and out of the lights as they patrolled every foot of the acreage, their rifles at the ready, their eyes alert.
Kendrick snapped off the third replay he had watched on television of President Langford Jennings’s suddenly called press conference regarding one Congressman Evan Kendrick of Colorado. It was more outrageous than Dennison had projected, filled with gut-wrenching pauses accompanied by a constant series of well-rehearsed grins that so obviously conveyed the pride and the agony beneath the surface of the man smiling. The President once again said everything in general terms and nothing specific—except in one area: Until all proper security measures are in place, I have asked Congressman Kendrick, a man we are all so proud of, to remain in protective seclusion. And with this request, I hereby give dire warning. Should cowardly terrorists anywhere make any attempt on the life of my good friend, my close colleague, someone I look upon no less than I would a younger brother, the full might of the United States will be employed by ground, sea and air against determined enclaves of those responsible. Determined? Oh, my God!
A telephone rang. Evan looked around trying to find out where it was. It was across the room on a desk; he swung his legs off the lounger and walked to the startlingly intrusive instrument.
“Yes?”
“She’s flying over on military transport with a senior attaché from the embassy in Cairo. She’s listed as a secretarial aide, the name’s unimportant. The ETA is seven o’clock in the morning our time. She’ll be in Maryland by ten at the latest.”
“What does she know?”
“Nothing.”
“You had to say something,” insisted Kendrick.
“She was told it was new and urgent instructions from her government, instructions that could be transmitted only in person over here.”
“She bought that nonsense?”
“She didn’t have a choice. She was picked up at her flat in Cairo and has been in protective custody ever since. Have a lousy night, you bastard.”
“Thanks, Herbie.” Evan hung up the phone, both relieved and frightened by the prospect of tomorrow morning’s confrontation with the woman he had known as Khalehla, a woman he had made love to in a frenzy of fear and exhaustion. That impulsive act and the desperation that led to it had to be forgotten. He had to determine whether he was re-meeting an enemy or a friend. Regardless, there was now a schedule, at least for the next twelve or fifteen hours. It was time to call Ann O’Reilly and, through her, reach Manny. It did not matter who knew where he was; he was the official guest of the President of the United States.
23
Emmanuel Weingrass sat in the red Naugahyde booth with the stocky, mustached owner of the Mesa Verde café. The past two hours had been stressful for Manny, somewhat reminiscent of those crazy days in Paris when he had worked with the Mossad. The current situation was nowhere near as melodramatic and his adversaries were hardly lethal, but still he was an elderly man who had to get from one place to another without being seen or stopped. In Paris he had to run a gauntlet of terrorist scouts without being noticed from Sacré-Coeur to the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Here in Colorado he had to get from Evan’s house to the town of Mesa Verde without being stopped and locked up by his team of nurses, all of whom were charging about because of the activity outside.
“How did you do it?” asked Gonzalez-Gonzalez, the café’s owner as he poured Weingrass
a glass of whisky.
“Civilized man’s second oldest need for privacy, Gee-Gee. The toilet. I went to the toilet and climbed out a window. Then I mingled with the crowd taking pictures with one of Evan’s cameras, like a real photographer, you know, until I got a taxi here.”
“Hey, man,” interrupted Gonzalez-Gonzalez. “Those cats are making dineros today!”
“Thieves, they are! I climbed in and the first thing the goniff said to me was ‘One hundred dollars to the airport, mister.’ So I said to him, taking off my hat, ‘The State Taxi Commission will be interested to hear about the new Verde rates,’ and he says to me, ‘Oh, it’s you, Mr. Weingrass, just a joke, Mr. Weingrass,’ and then I tell him, ‘Charge ’em two hundred and take me to Gee-Gee’s!’ ”
Both men broke into loud laughter as the pay telephone on the wall beyond the booth erupted in a staccato ring. Gonzalez placed his hand on Manny’s arm. “Let García get it,” he said.
“Why? You said my boy called twice before!”
“García knows what to say. I just told him.”
“Tell me!”
“He’ll give the Congressman the number of my office phone and tell him to call back in two minutes.”
“Gee-Gee, what the hell are you doing?”
“A couple of minutes after you came in, a gringo I don’t know arrived.”
“So what? You get plenty of people in here you don’t know.”
“He doesn’t belong here, Manny. He ain’t got no raincoat or no hat or no camera, but he still don’t belong here. He’s got on a suit—with a vest.” Weingrass started to turn his head. “Don’t,” ordered Gonzalez, now gripping Weingrass’s arm. “Every now and then he looks over here from his table. He’s got you on his mind.”
“So what do we do?”
“Just wait and get up when I tell you to.”
The waiter named García hung up the pay phone, coughed once, and went over to the dark-suited, red-haired man with a vest. He leaned down and said something close to the well-dressed customer’s face. The man stared coldly at his unexpected messenger; the waiter shrugged and crossed back to the bar. The man slowly, unobtrusively, put several bills on the table, got up, and walked out the nearby entrance.
“Now,” whispered Gonzalez-Gonzalez, rising and gesturing for Manny to follow him. Ten seconds later they were in the owner’s disheveled office. “The Congressman will call back in about a minute,” said Gee-Gee, indicating the chair behind a desk that had seen better days decades ago.
“You’re sure it was Kendrick?” asked Weingrass.
“García’s cough told me yes.”
“What did José say to the guy at the table?”
“That he believed the message on the telephone must be for him, since no other customer fit his description.”
“What was the message?”
“Quite simple, amigo. It was important for him to reach his people outside.”
“Just that?”
“He left, didn’t he? That tells us something, doesn’t it?”
“Like what?”
“Uno, he has people to reach, no? Dos, they are either outside this grand establishment or he can talk to them by other means of communication—namely, a fancy telephone in an automobile, yes? Tres, he did not come in here in his also-fancy suit to have a Tex-Mex beer that practically chokes him—as my fine sparkling wine often chokes you, no? Cuatro, he is no doubt federale.”
“Government?” asked Manny, astonished.
“Personally, of course, I have never been involved with illegals crossing the borders from my beloved country to the south, but the stories reach even such innocents as myself.… We know what to look for, my friend. Comprende, hombre?”
“I always said,” said Weingrass, sitting behind the desk. “Find the classiest non-class joints in town and you can learn more about life than in all the sewers of Paris.”
“Paris, France, means a great deal to you, doesn’t it, Manny?”
“It’s fading, amigo. I’m not sure why, but it’s fading. Something’s happening here with my boy and I can’t understand it. But it’s important.”
“He means much to you also, yes?”
“He is my son.” The telephone rang, and Weingrass yanked it up to his ear as Gonzalez-Gonzalez went out the door. “Air-head, is that you?”
“What have you got out there, Manny?” asked Kendrick over the line from the sterile house on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “A Mossad unit covering you?”
“Far more effective,” answered the old architect from the Bronx. “There are no accountants, no CPAs counting the shekels over an egg cream. Now, you. What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know, I swear I don’t know!” Evan recounted his day in detail, from Sabri Hassan’s startling news about the Oman revelations while he was in his pool to his hiding out in a cheap motel in Virginia; from his confrontation with Frank Swann of the State Department to his arrival at the White House under escort; from his hostile meeting with the White House chief of staff to his eventual presentation to the President of the United States, who proceeded to louse up everything by scheduling an award ceremony in the Blue Room next Tuesday—with the Marine Band. Finally, to the fact that the woman named Khalehla, who had first saved his life in Bahrain, was in reality a case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency and was being flown over for him to question.
“From what you’ve told me, she had nothing to do with exposing you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you believed her when she said she was an Arab filled with shame, you told me that. In some ways, Air-head, I know you better than you know yourself. You are not easily fooled about such matters. It’s what made you so good with the Kendrick Group.… For this woman to expose you would only add to her shame and further inflame the crazy world she lives in.”
“She’s the only one left, Manny. The others wouldn’t; they couldn’t.”
“Then there are others beyond others.”
“For God’s sake, who? These were the only people who knew I was there.”
“You just said this Swann told you a blond creep with a foreign accent figured you were in Masqat. Where did he get his information?”
“No one can find him, not even the White House.”
“Maybe I know people who can find him,” interrupted Weingrass.
“No, Manny,” insisted Kendrick firmly. “This isn’t Paris and those Israelis are way off limits. I owe them too much, although someday I’d like you to explain to me the interest they had in a certain hostage at the embassy.”
“I was never told,” said Weingrass. “I knew there was an initial plan the unit had trained for and I assumed it was designed to reach someone inside, but they never discussed it in front of me. Those people know how to keep their mouths shut.… What’s your next move?”
“Tomorrow morning with the Rashad woman. I told you.”
“After that.”
“You haven’t been watching television.”
“I’m at Gee-Gee’s. He only allows videotapes, remember? He’s got a replay on one of the ’82 Series, and most everyone at the bar thinks it’s today. What’s on television?”
“The President. He announced that I’m in protective seclusion.”
“Sounds like jail to me.”
“In a way it is, but the prison’s tolerable and the warden’s given me privileges.”
“Do I get a number?”
“I wouldn’t know it. There’s nothing printed on the phone, only a blank strip, but I’ll keep you informed. I’ll call you if I move. Nobody could trace this line and it doesn’t matter if they did.”
“Okay, now let me ask you something. Did you mention me to anyone?”
“Good God, no. You may be in the classified Oman file and I did say that a lot of other people deserved credit besides myself, but I never used your name. Why?”
“I’m being followed.”
“What?”
“It’s a wrinkle I
don’t like. Gee-Gee says the clown on my tail is federal and that there are others with him.”
“Maybe Dennison picked you out from the file and assigned you protection.”
“From what? Even in Paris I’m vault-tight—if I wasn’t, I’d have been dead three years ago. And what makes you think I’m in any file? Outside of the unit no one knew my name and none of our names were used in that conference the morning we all left. Finally, Air-head, if I’m being protected, it’d be a good idea to let me know about it. Because if I’m dangerous enough to warrant that kind of protection, I might just blow the head off someone I don’t know who’s protecting me.”
“As usual,” said Kendrick, “you may have an ounce of logic in your normal pound of implausibility. I’ll check on it.”
“Do that. I may not have too many years left but I wouldn’t want them cut short by a bullet in my head—from either side. Call me tomorrow, because now I’ve got to get back to the coven before the inhabitants report my departure to the head police warlock.”
“Give my regards to Gee-Gee,” added Evan. “And tell him that when I’m home he’s to stay the hell out of the importing business. Also, thank him, Manny.” Kendrick hung up the phone, his hand still on it. He picked it up and dialed O.
“Operator,” said a somewhat hesitant female voice after more unanswered rings than seemed normal.
“I’m not sure why,” began Evan, “but I have an idea that you’re not an ordinary run-of-the-mill operator for the Bell Telephone Company.”
“Sir …?”
“It doesn’t matter, miss. My name is Kendrick and I have to reach Mr. Herbert Dennison, the White House chief of staff, as soon as possible—it’s urgent. I’m asking you to do your best to find him and have him call me within the next five minutes. If that’s impossible, I’ll be forced to call my secretary’s husband, who’s a lieutenant on the Washington police, and tell him I’m being held prisoner at a location I’m fairly certain I can identify accurately.”
“Sir, please!”
“I think I’m being reasonable and very clear,” interrupted Evan. “Mr. Dennison is to reach me within the next five minutes, and the countdown’s begun. Thank you, Operator, have a good day.” Again Kendrick hung up the phone, but now he removed his hand and walked over to a wall bar, which held an ice bucket and assorted bottles of expensive whisky. He poured himself a drink, looked at his watch, and proceeded toward a large casement window that looked out on the rear floodlit grounds. He was amused at the sight of a croquet course bordered by white wrought-iron furniture; he was less amused by the sight of a marine guard dressed in the casual, unmilitary uniform of the estate’s staff. He was pacing a garden path near the stone wall, his uncasual, very military repeating rifle angled in front. Manny was right: he was in jail. Moments later the telephone rang and the congressman from Colorado walked back to it. “Hello, Herbie, how are you?”