The Icarus Agenda

Chapter 10

The early light progressively threatened. Azra looked up at the morning sky, swearing at himself—including the rough-hewn Yosef in his oaths—for taking a wrong turn at the Kabritta Tower and thus wasting precious minutes. The three fugitives had torn off their prison trousers high above the ankles, at mid-calf, and the sleeves away from their shoulders. Without the benefit of sunlight they could pass for labourers brought in from Lebanon or the slums of Abu Dhabi, spending their rials on the only recreation accessible to them: The whores and the whisky available in the el Shari el Mish kwayis, that land-locked island of the city.

They were in the recessed, concrete employees' entrance of the Waljat Hospital less than two hundred yards away from the gates of the American Embassy. A narrow street on the right intersected the broad thoroughfare. Angling around the corner was a line of shops, indistinguishable behind their iron shutters. All business was suspended while the madness lasted. In the distance, inside the gates of the embassy, were ragtag squads of lethargic young people walking slowly, the weight of their weapons dragging their arms and shoulders down, doing what they were ordered to do for their jihad, their holy war. The lethargy, however, would vanish with the first rays of the sun, and manic energy would erupt with the first wave of onlookers, especially the radio and television crews—mainly because of those crews. The angry children would go onstage within the hour.

Azra studied the large square in front of the gates. Opposite, on the north side, stood three white two-storey office buildings close to one another. The curtained windows were dark, no signs of light anywhere, which was immaterial in any event. If there were men inside watching, they were too far away from the gates to hear what he would say softly through the bars, and the light was still too dim for him to be definitely identified—if, indeed, word of their escape had reached the post. And even if it had, the enemy would not mount a rash attack on the basis of vague possibilities; the consequences were too deadly. Actually, the square was deserted except for a row of beggars, their clothes in shreds, squatting in front of the embassy's sandstone walls, their alms plates in front, several with their own excrement in evidence. The filthiest of these outcasts were not potential agents of the sultan or foreign governments, but others might be. He focused his eyes on each of the latter, looking for sudden, abrupt movements that would betray a man not used to a beggar's locked, hunkered stance. Only someone whose muscles were trained to withstand the interminable stress of a beggar's squat could remain immobile for any length of time. None moved, none squeezed a leg; it was not proof but it was all he could ask for. Azra snapped his fingers at Yosef, removing the MAC-10 weapon from under his shirt and thrusting it towards the older terrorist.

'I'm going over,' he said in Arabic. 'Cover me. If any of those beggars make an unbeggarly move, I expect you to be there.'

'Go ahead. I'll swing out behind you in the hospital's shadow and slip from doorway to doorway on the right side. My aim is unequalled, so if there's one unbeggarly move, there is no beggar!'

'Don't anticipate, Yosef. Don't make a mistake and fire when you shouldn't. I have to reach one of those imbeciles inside. I'll stumble down as though it wasn't the best morning of my life.' The young Palestinian turned to Kendrick, who was crouched in the sparse foliage by the hospital wall. 'You, Bahrudi,' he whispered in English. 'When Yosef reaches the first building over there, come out slowly and follow him, but for God's sake, don't be obvious! Pause now and then to scratch yourself, spit frequently, and remember that your appearance doesn't belong to someone with good posture.

'I know those things!' Evan lied emphatically, impressed with what he was learning about terrorists. 'You think I haven't employed such tactics a thousand times more than you have?'

'I don't know what to think,' answered Azra simply. 'I do know that I didn't like the way you walked past the Zawawi Mosque. The mullahs and the muezzins were congregating. Perhaps you're better in the refined capitals of Europe.'

'I assure you I'm adequate,' said Kendrick icily, knowing he had to retain the Arabic version of strength, which came with cold understatement. His playacting was quickly deflated, however, as the young terrorist grinned. It was a genuine smile, the first he had observed in the man who called himself Blue.

'I'm assured,' said Azra, nodding his head. 'I'm here and not a corpse in the desert. Thank you for that, Amal Bahrudi. Now keep your eyes on me. Go where I direct you.'

Pivoting swiftly, Blue rose and walked haltingly across the hospital's short stretch of zoysia lawn and into the wide thoroughfare that led to the square proper. Within seconds, Yosef raced out, ninety degrees to the right of his superior, crossing the narrow street twenty feet from the corner, hugging the side of the building in the dim light's darkest shadows. As the lone, isolated figure of Azra came into clear view staggering towards the embassy gates, Yosef spun around the corner; the last object Evan saw was the murderous MAC-10 machine pistol, held low in his left hand by the blunt sergeant-foreman. Kendrick knew it was the moment to move and a part of him suddenly wished he were back in Colorado, southwest of Telluride at the base of the mountains and at temporary peace with the world. Then the images came again, filling his inner screen: Thunder. A series of deafening explosions. Smoke. Walls suddenly collapsing everywhere amid the screams of terrified children about to die. Children! And women—young mothers—shrieking in horror and protest as tons of rubble came cascading down from a hundred feet above the earth. And helpless men—friends, husbands, fathers—roaring defiantly against the cascading hell they knew instantly would be their tomb… the Mahdi!

Evan got to his feet, breathed deeply, and started out towards the square. He reached the north side pavement in front of the barricaded shops, his shoulders bent; he paused frequently to scratch himself and spit.

'The woman was right,' whispered the dark-skinned Arab in Western clothes peering out through a loose slat in a boarded-up store that only twenty-two days ago had been an attractive cafe devoted to cardamom coffee, cakes and fruit. 'The older pig was so close I could have touched him as he passed by! I tell you, I did not breathe.'

'Shhh!' warned the man at his side in full Arab dress. 'Here he comes. The American. His height betrays him.'

'Others will betray him also. He will not survive.'

'Who is he?' asked the robed man, his whispered voice barely audible.

'It's not for us to know. That he risks his life for us is all that matters. We listen to the woman, those are our orders.' Outside, the stooped figure in the street passed the store, pausing to scratch his groin while spitting into the gutter. Beyond, diagonally across the square, another figure, blurred in the dim light, approached the embassy gates. 'It was the woman,' continued the Arab in Western clothes, still squinting between the loose boards, 'who told us to watch for them on the waterfront, checking the small boats, and on the roads north and south, even here where they were least expected. Well, contact her and tell her the unexpected has happened. Then call the others on the Kalbah and Bustafi Wadis and let them know they needn't watch any longer.'

'Of course,' said the robed man starting towards the back of the deserted dark cafe with its profusion of chairs eerily perched on top of tables as if the management expected unearthly customers who disdained the floor. Then the Arab stopped, quickly returning to his colleague. 'Then what do we do?'

'The woman will tell you. Hurry! The pig by the gates is gesturing for someone inside. That's where they're going. Inside!'

Azra gripped the iron bars, his eyes darting up at the sky; the sprays of light were growing brighter by the minute in the east. Soon the dull dark grey of the square would be replaced by the harsh, blinding sun of Masqat; it would happen at any moment, as it did every dawn, an explosion of light that was suddenly total, all-encompassing. Quickly! Pay attention to me, you idiots, you mongrels! The enemy is everywhere, watching, scanning, waiting for the instant to pounce, and I am now a prize of extraordinary value. One of us must reach Bahrain, reach the Mahdi! For the love of your goddamned Allah, will somebody come over here? I cannot raise my voice!

Someone did! A youngster in soiled fatigues broke hesitantly away from his five-man squad, squinting in the still dim but growing light, drawn by the sight of the odd-looking person at the left side of the huge chained double gate. As he drew nearer he walked faster, his expression slowly changing from the quizzical to the astonished.

'Azra?' he cried. 'Is it you?

'Be quiet!' whispered Blue, pressing both palms repeatedly through the bars. The teenager was one of the dozens of recruits he had instructed in the basic use of repeating weapons and, if he remembered correctly, not a prize pupil among so many just like him.

'They said you had gone on a secret mission, an assignment so holy we should thank almighty Allah for your strength!'

'I was captured—'

'Allah be praised!'

'For what?'

'For your having slain the infidels! If you had not you would be in the blessed arms of Allah.'

'I escaped—’

'Without slaying the infidels?' asked the youngster, sadness in his voice.

'They're all dead,' replied Blue with exasperated finality. 'Now, listen to—'

'Allah be praised!'

'Allah be quiet—you be quiet and listen to me! I must get inside, quickly. Go to Yateem or Ahbyahd—run as if your life depended on it—’

'My life is nothing!'

'Mine is, damn it! Have someone come back here with instructions. Run!'

The waiting produced a pounding in Blue's chest and temples as he watched the sky, watched the light in the east about to inflame this infinitesimal part of the earth, knowing that when it did he would be finished, dead, no longer able to fight the bastards who had stolen his life, erased his childhood with blood, taken his and Zaya's parents away in a burst of gunfire sanctioned by the killers of Israel.

He remembered it all so clearly, so painfully. His father, a gentle, brilliant man who had been a medical student in Tel Aviv until, in his third year, the authorities deemed him better suited to the life of a pharmacist to make room for an immigrating Jew in the medical college. It was common practice. Remove the Arabs from the esteemed professions was the Israeli credo. As the years went on, however, the father became the only 'doctor' in their village on the West Bank; the government's visiting physicians from Be'er Sheva were incompetents who were forced to make their shekels in the small towns and the camps. One such physician complained, and it was as if the writing were stamped on the Wailing Wall. The pharmacy was shut down.

'We have our unspectacular lives to live; when will they let us live them?' the father and husband had screamed.

The answer came for a daughter named Zaya and a son who became Azra the Terrorist. The Israeli Commission of Arab Affairs on the West Bank again made a pronouncement. Their father was a troublemaker. The family was ordered out of the village.

They went north, towards Lebanon, towards anywhere that would accept them, and along the journey of their exodus, they stopped at a refugee camp called Shatila.

While brother and sister watched from behind the low stone wall of a garden, they saw their mother and father slaughtered, as were so many others, their bodies broken by staccato fusillades of bullets, snapping them into the ground, blood spewing from their eyes and their mouths. And up above, in the hills, the sudden thunder of Israeli artillery was to the ears of children the sound of unholy triumph. Someone had very much approved of the operation.

Thus was born Zaya Yateem, from gentle child to ice-cold strategist, and her brother, known to the world as Azra, the newest crown prince of terrorists.

The memories stopped with the sight of a man running inside the gates of the embassy.

'Blue!' cried Ahbyahd, the streaks of white in his hair apparent in the growing light, his voice a harsh, astonished whisper as he raced across the courtyard. 'In Allah's name what happened? Your sister is beside herself but she cannot come outside, not as a woman, not at this hour, and especially not with you here. Eyes are everywhere—what happened to you?'

'I'll tell you once we're inside. There's no time now. Hurry!'

'We?'

'Myself, Yosef, and a man named Bahrudi—he comes from the Mahdi! Quickly! The light's nearly up. Where do we go?'

'Almighty God… the Mahdi!'

'Please, Ahbyahd!'

'The east wall, about forty metres from the south corner, there's an old sewer line—’

'I know it! We've been working on it. It's clear now?'

'One must crouch low and climb slowly, but yes, it's clear. There is an opening—’

'Beneath the three large rocks on the water,' said Azra nodding rapidly. 'Have someone there. We race against the light!'

The terrorist called Blue slipped away from the chained gates and with gathering speed, slowly, subtly discarding his previous posture, quickly rounded the south edge of the wall. He stopped, pressing his back into the stone, his eyes roaming up the line of barricaded shops. Yosef stepped partially out of a boarded-up recessed doorway; he had been watching Azra and wanted the young leader to know it. The older man hissed and in seconds 'Amal Bahrudi' emerged from a narrow alleyway between the buildings; staying in the shadows, he raced up the pavement, joining Yosef in the doorway. Azra gestured to his left, indicating a barely-paved road in front of him that ran parallel to the embassy wall; it was beyond the stretch of shops on the square; across the way there was only a wasteland of rubble and sand grass. In the distance, towards the fiery horizon, was the rock-laden coastline of the Oman Gulf. One after the other the fugitives raced down the road in their torn prison clothes and hard leather sandals, past the walls of the embassy into the sudden, startling glare of the bursting sun. Azra leading, they reached a small promontory above the crashing waves. With sure-footed agility, the world's new crown prince of killers started down over the huge boulders, stopping every now and then to gesture behind him, pointing out the areas of green sea moss where a man could lose his life by slipping and plunging down into the jagged rocks below. In less than a minute they reached an oddly-shaped indentation at the bottom of the short cliff where the huge stones met the water. It was marked by three boulders forming a strange triangle at the base of which was a cavelike opening no more than three feet wide and continuously assaulted by the pounding surf.

'There it is!' exclaimed Azra, exaltation and relief in his voice. 'I knew I could find it!'

'What is it?' yelled Kendrick, trying to be heard over the crashing waves.

'An old sewer line,' roared Blue. 'Built hundreds of years ago, a communal toilet continuously washed down by sea water carried up by slaves.'

'They bored through rock?'

'No, Amal. They creased the surface and angled the rocks above; nature took care of the rest. A reverse aqueduct, if you like. It's a steep climb but as someone had to build it, there are ridges for feet—slaves' feet, like our Palestinian feet, no?'

'How do we get in there?'

'We walk through water. If the prophet Jesus can walk on it, the least we can do is walk through it. Come. The embassy!'

Perspiring heavily, Anthony MacDonald climbed the open waterfront staircase on the side of the old warehouse. The creaking of the steps under his weight joined the sounds of wood and rope that erupted from the piers where hulls and stretched halyards scraped the slips along the docks. The first yellow rays of the sun pulsated over the waters of the harbour, broken by intruding skiffs and aged trawlers heading out for the day's catch, passing observant marine patrols that every now and then signalled a boat to stop for closer inspection.

Tony had ordered his driver to crawl the car back towards Masqat on the deserted road without headlights until they reached a back street in the As Saada that cut across the city to the waterfront. Only when they encountered streetlamps did MacDonald instruct the driver to switch on the lights. He had no idea where the three fugitives were running or where they expected to hide in the daylight with an army of police searching for them, but he assumed it would be with one of the Mahdi's more unlikely agents in the city. He would avoid them; there was too much to learn, too many contradictory things to understand before a chance confrontation with the young ambitious Azra. But there was one place he could go, one man he could see without fear of being seen himself. A hired killer who followed orders blindly for money, a stick of human garbage who made contact with potential clients only in the filthy alleyways of the el Shari el Mish kwayis. Only those who had to know knew where he lived.

Tony heaved his way up the last flight of steps to the short, thick door at the top that led to the man he had come to see. As he reached the final step he froze, mouth gaping, eyes bulging. Suddenly, without warning, the door whipped open on greased hinges as the half-naked killer lunged out on the short platform, a knife in his left hand, its long, razor-sharp blade glistening in the new sun, while in his right was a small .22 calibre pistol. The blade was poised across MacDonald's throat, the barrel of the gun jammed into his left temple; unable to breathe, the obese Englishman gripped both railings with his hands to keep from falling back down the steps.

'It is you,' said the gaunt, hollow-cheeked man, withdrawing the pistol but keeping the knife in place. 'You are not to come here. You are never to come here!'

Swallowing air, his immense body rigid, MacDonald spoke hoarsely, feeling the psychopath's blade across his throat. 'If it were not an emergency, I would never have done so, that should be perfectly clear.'

'What is clear is that I was cheated!' replied the man, wiggling the knife. 'I killed that importer's son in the same way I could kill you at this moment. I carved up that girl's face and left her in the streets with her skirt above her head and I was cheated.'

'No one meant to.'

'Someone did!'

'I'll make it up to you. We must talk. As I mentioned, it's an emergency.'

'Talk here. You don't come inside. No one comes inside!'

'Very well. If you'll be so kind as to permit me to stand rather than hang on for dear life half over this all too ancient staircase—'

'Talk.'

Tony steadied himself on the third step from the top, taking out a handkerchief and blotting his perspiring forehead, his gaze on the knife below. 'It's imperative I reach the leaders inside the embassy. Since they cannot, of course, come out, I must go in to them.'

'It is too dangerous, especially for the one who gets you inside, since he remains outside.' The bone-gaunt killer pulled the blade away from MacDonald's throat, only to readjust it with a twist of his wrist, the glistening point now resting at the base of the Englishman's neck. 'You can talk to them on the telephone, people do all the time.'

'What I have to say—what I must ask them—can't be spoken over the phone. It's vital that only the leaders hear my words and I theirs.'

'I can sell you a number that is not published in the listings.'

'It's published somewhere and if you have it, others do also. I cannot take the risk. Inside. I must get inside.'

'You are difficult,' said the psychopath, his left eyelid flickering, both pupils dilated. 'Why are you difficult?'

'Because I am immensely rich and you are not. You need money for your extravagances… your habits.'

'You insult me!' spat out the killer-for-hire, his voice strident but not loud, the half-crazed man aware of the fishermen and dock labourers trudging to their morning chores three storeys below.

'I'm only being realistic. Inside. How much?'

The killer coughed his foul breath in MacDonald's face, pulling the blade back and settling his rheumy stare on his past and present benefactor. 'It will cost a great deal of money. More than you have ever paid before.'

'I'm prepared for a reasonable increase, not exorbitant, mind you, but reasonable. We'll always have work for you—’

'There's an embassy press conference at ten o'clock this morning,' interrupted the partially drugged man. 'As usual, the journalists and television people will be selected at the last minute, their names called out at the gates. Be there, and give me a telephone number so I can give you a name within the next two hours.'

Tony did so: his hotel and his room. 'How much, dear boy?' he added.

The killer lowered the knife and stated the amount in Omani rials; it was equivalent to three thousand English pounds, or roughly five thousand American dollars. 'I have expenses,' he explained. 'Bribes must be paid or the one who bribes is dead.'

'It's outrageous! cried MacDonald.

'Forget the whole thing.'

'Accepted,' said the Englishman.

Khalehla paced her hotel room, and although she had given up cigarettes for the sixth time in her thirty-two years, she smoked one after another, her eyes constantly straying to the telephone. Under no condition could she operate from the palace. That connection had been jeopardized enough. Damn that son of a bitch!

Anthony MacDonald—cipher, drunk… someone's agent-extraordinary—had his efficient network in Masqat, but she was not without resources herself, thanks to a roommate at Radcliffe who was now a sultan's wife—thanks to Khalehla's having introduced a fellow Arab to her best friend a number of years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts. God, how the world moved in smaller, swifter and ever more familiar circles! Her mother, a native Californian, had met her father, an exchange-student from Port Said, while both were in graduate school at Berkeley, she an Egyptologist, he working for his doctorate in Western Civilization, both aiming for academic careers. They fell in love and got married. The blonde California girl and the olive-skinned Egyptian.

In time, with Khalehla's birth, the stunned, racially-absolute grandparents on both sides discovered that there was more to children than the purity of strain. The barriers fell in a sudden rush of love. Four elderly individuals, two couples predisposed to abhor each other, had bridged the gaps of culture, skin and belief by finding joy in a child and other mutually shared pleasures. They became inseparable, the banker and his wife from San Diego and the wealthy exporter from Port Said and his only Arab wife.

'What am I doing?' cried Khalehla to herself. This was no time to think about the past, the present was everything! Then she realized why her mind had wandered—two reasons really. Firstly the pressures had become too great; she needed a few minutes to herself, to think about herself and those she loved if only to try to understand the hatred that was everywhere. The second was the more important reason. The faces and the words spoken at a dinner party long ago had been lurking in the background, especially the words, quietly echoing off the walls of her mind; they had made an impression on an eighteen-year-old girl about to leave for America.

'The monarchs of the past had precious little to their overall credit,' her father had said that night in Cairo when the whole family was together, including both sets of grandparents. 'But they understood something our present leaders don't consider—can't consider actually, unless they try to become hereditary rulers themselves, which wouldn't be seemly in these times although some do try.'

'What's that, young man?' asked the California banker. 'I haven't entirely given up on monarchy, with the proper right-wing principles, of course.'

'Well, throughout history, they arranged marriages to make alliances, to bring the diverse nations into their central families. Once a person knows another under those circumstances—dining, dancing, hunting, even telling jokes—it's difficult to maintain a stereotyped bias, isn't it?'

Everyone around the table had looked at one another, smiles and gentle nods emerging.

'In such circles, however, my son,' remarked the exporter from Port Said, 'things did not always work out so felicitously as here. I'm no scholar, but there were wars, families against their own, ambitions thwarted.'

'True, revered Father, but how much worse might it have all been without such arranged marriages? Far, far worse, I'm afraid.'

'I refuse to be seen as a geopolitical tool!' Khalehla's mother had exclaimed, laughing.

'Actually, my dear, everything between us was arranged by our devious parents here. Have you any idea how they've profited from our alliance?'

'The only profit I've ever seen is the lovely young lady who's my granddaughter,' said the banker.

'She's off to America, my friend,' said the exporter. 'Your profits may dwindle.'

'How does it feel, darling? Quite an adventure for you, I'd think.'

'It's hardly the first time, Grandmother. We've visited you and Grandfather a lot, and I've been to quite a few cities.'

'It will be different now, dear.' Khalehla forgot who had said those words but they were the beginning of one of the strangest chapters of her life. 'You'll be living there,' added whoever it was.

'I can't wait. Everyone's so friendly, you feel so wanted, so liked.'

Once again those around the table looked at one another. It was the banker who had broken the silence. 'You may not always feel that way,' he said quietly. 'There will be times when you're not wanted, not liked, and it will confuse you, certainly hurt you.'

'That's hard to believe, Grandfather,' said an ebullient young girl Khalehla only vaguely remembered.

The Californian had briefly looked at his son-in-law, his eyes pained. 'As I think back, it's hard for me to believe it, too. Don't ever forget, young lady, if problems arise or if things become difficult, pick up the phone and I'll be on the next plane.'

'Oh, Grandfather, I can't imagine doing that.'

And she hadn't, although there were times when she came close, only pride and what strength she could summon stopping her. Shvartzeh Arviyah!… 'Nigger-Arab!' was her first introduction to one-on-one hatred. Not the blind, irrational hatred of mobs running amok in the streets, brandishing placards and crudely made signs, cursing an unseen enemy far away across distant borders, but of young people like herself, in a pluralistic community of learning, sharing classrooms and cafeterias, where the worth of the individual was paramount, from entrance through constant evaluation to graduation. Each contributed to the whole, but as himself or herself, not as an institutional robot except perhaps on the playing fields, and even there individual performance was recognized, often more so in defeat, touchingly more so. ' Yet for so long she had not been an individual; she had lost herself. That had been eradicated, transferred to an abstract, insidious racial collective called Arab. Dirty Arab, devious Arab, murderous Arab—Arab, Arab, Arab—until she couldn't stand it any longer! She stayed by herself in her room, turning down offers from dormitory acquaintances to visit the collegiate drinking halls; twice had been enough.

The first should have been enough. She had gone to the ladies' room only to find it blocked by two male students; they were Jewish students, to be sure, but they were also American students.

'Thought you Arabs didn't drink!' shouted the drunken young man on her left.

'It's a choice one makes,' she had replied.

'I'm told you Arviyah piss on the floor of your tents!' cried the other, leering.

'You were misinformed. We're quite fastidious. May I please go inside—'

'Not here, Arab. We don't know what you'd leave on the toilet seat and we have a couple of yehudiyah with us. Got the message, Arab?

The breaking point, however, came at the end of her second term. She had done well in a course taught by a renowned Jewish professor, well enough to have been singled out by the sought-after teacher as the student he deemed to have achieved the most. The prize, an annual event in his class, was a personally inscribed copy of one of his works. Many of her classmates, Jews and non-Jews alike, had come around to congratulate her, but when she left the building three others in stocking masks had stopped her on a wooded path back to her dormitory.

'What did you do?' one asked. 'Threaten to blow his house up?'

'Maybe knife his kids with a sharp Arab dagger?'

'Hell, no! She'd call in Arafat!'

'We're going to teach you a lesson, Shvartzeh Arviyah't'

'If the book means so much to you, take it!'

'No, Arab, you take it.'

She had been raped. 'This is for Munich!' 'This is for the children in the Golan kibbutz!' 'This is for my cousin on the beaches of Ashdod where you bastards killed him!' There had been no sexual gratification for the attackers, only the fury of inflicting punishment on the Arab.

She had half crawled, half stumbled back towards her dormitory when a very important person came into her life. One Roberta Aldridge, the inestimable Bobbie Aldridge, the iconoclastic daughter of the New England Aldridges.

'Scum!'' she had screamed into the trees of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

'You must never tell!' pleaded the young Egyptian girl. 'You don't understand!’

'Don't you worry about that, honey. In Boston we have a phrase that means the same thing from Southie to Beacon Hill. “Them that gives, gets!” And those motherfuckers will get, take my word!'

'No! They'll come after me—they won't understand, either! I don't hate Jews… my dearest friend since childhood is the daughter of a rabbi, one of my father's closest colleagues. I don't hate Jews. They'll say I do because to them I'm just a dirty Arab, but I don't! My family's not like that. We don't hate.'

'Hold it, kid. I didn't say anything about Jews, you did. I said motherfuckers, which is an all-inclusive term, so to speak.'

'It's finished here. I'm finished. I'll leave.'

'The hell you will! You're seeing my doctor, who'd better know his marbles, and then you move in with me. Christ, I haven't had a cause in almost two years!'

Praise God and Allah, and all those other deities above. I have a friend. And somehow, within the pain and the hatred of those days, an idea was born that grew into a commitment. An eighteen-year-old girl knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

The telephone rang. The past was finished, over, the present was everything! She ran to the bedside phone, yanking it out of its cradle. 'Yes?'

'He's here.'

'Where?'

'The embassy.'

'Oh, my God! What's happening? What's he doing?'

'He's with two others—’

'There are three, not four?'

'We have only seen three. One is at the gate among the beggars. He's been talking to the terrorists inside.'

'The American! Where is he?'

'With the third man. The two of them stay in the shadows, only the first man shows himself. He is the one who makes the decisions, not the American.'

'What do you mean?'

'We think he's making arrangements for them to go inside.'

'No!' screamed Khalehla. 'They can't—he can't, he mustn't! Stop them, stop him!'

'Such orders should come from the palace, madame—’

'Such orders come from me! You've been told! The prisoner compound was one thing, but not the embassy, never the embassy, not for him! Go out and take them, stop them, kill them if you have to! Kill him!'

'Hurry!' cried the robed Arab running to his colleague in the front of the boarded-up restaurant and cracking the bolt of his machine gun into the firing position. 'Our orders are to take them now, stop them, stop the American. Kill him, if we must.'

'Kill him?' asked the astonished official from the palace.

'Those are the orders. Kill him!'

'The orders have come too late. They're gone.'

Ultra Maximum Secure

No Existing Intercepts

Proceed

The figure in the dark sterile room touched the letters of the keyboard with angry precision.

I've broken the Langley access codes and it's madness! Not the CIA, for the liaison is withholding nothing. Instead, the insanity is with the subject. He has gone into the embassy! He can't survive. He'll be found out—in the toilet, at a meal with or without utensils, with a single reaction to a phrase. He's been away too long! I've factored in every possibility and my appliances offer little hope. Perhaps my appliances and I were too quick to render judgment. Perhaps our national messiah is no more than a fool, but then all messiahs have been considered fools and idiots until proved otherwise. That is my hope, my prayer.