The Icarus Agenda

Chapter 14

Emmanuel Weingrass pulled code Grey's radio to his lips and spoke. 'Go ahead and remember to keep the line open. I've got to hear everything!’

'If you'll forgive me, Weingrass,' replied Ben-Ami from the shadows across Government Road. 'I would feel somewhat more secure if our colleague Grey also heard. You and I are not so adept in these situations as those young men.'

'They haven't a brain in their collective head. We have two.'

'This is not shul, Emmanuel, this is what's called the field and it can be very unpleasant.'

'I have every confidence in you, Benny boy, so long as you guarantee these kiddie radios can be heard through steel.'

'They're as clear as any electronic bug ever developed, with the added function of direct transmission. One just pushes the right buttons.'

'One doesn't,' said Weingrass, 'you do. Go on, we'll follow when we hear what this MacDonald-Strickland says.'

'Send code Grey first, please.' Out of the shadows near the marquee of the Tylos Hotel, Ben-Ami joined the bustling crowds around the entrance. People came and went, mostly male, mostly in Western dress, along with a smattering of women exclusively in Western dress. Taxis disgorged passengers, as others filled them, tipping a harried doorman whose sole job was to open and close doors, and every now and then to blow a strident whistle for a lowly, thobed bellhop to carry luggage. Ben-Ami melted into this melee and went inside. Moments later, through the background noise of the lobby, he could be heard dialling; squinting in irritation, Manny held up the radio between himself and the much taller, muscular code Grey. The first words from Room 202 were obscured; then the Mossad agent spoke.

'Shaikh Strickland?'

'Who's this?' The Englishman's cautious whisper was now distinct; Ben-Ami had adjusted the radio.

'I'm downstairs… Anah henah littee gáhrah—'

'Bloody damn black fool!' cried MacDonald. 'I don't speak that gibberish! Why are you calling from the lobby?'

'I was testing you, Mr. Strickland,' Ben-Ami broke in quickly. 'A man under stress often gives himself away. You might have asked me where my business trip was taking me, perhaps leading to a subsequent code. Then I would have known you were not the man—'

'Yes, yes, I understand! Thank Christ you're here! It's taken you long enough. I expected you a half-hour ago. You were to say something to me. Say it!'

'Not over the telephone,' answered the Mossad infiltrator firmly. 'Never over the telephone, you should know that.'

'If you think I'm just going to let you into my room—'

'I wouldn't if I were you,' interrupted Ben-Ami once again. 'We know you're armed.'

'You do?'

'Every weapon sold under a counter is known to us.'

'Yes… yes, of course.'

'Open your door with the latch on. If my words are incorrect, kill me.'

'Yes… very well. I'm sure it won't be necessary. But understand me, whoever you are, one misplaced syllable and you're a corpse!'

' I shall practise my English, Shaikh Strickland.'

A tiny green light suddenly began blinking on the small radio in Weingrass's hand. 'What the hell is that?' asked Manny.

'Direct transmission,' replied code Grey. 'Give it to me.' The Masada commando took the instrument and pressed a button. 'Go ahead.'

'He's alone!' said Ben-Ami's voice. 'We have to move quickly, take him now!'

'We don't make any moves, you Mossad imbecile!' countered Weingrass, grabbing the radio. 'Even those mutants from the State Department's Consular Operations can hear what they've just been told, but not the holy Mossad! They hear only their own voices, and maybe Abraham's if he's got a code ring out of a box of corn flakes!'

'Manny, I don't need this,' said Ben-Ami slowly, painfully over the radio.

'You need ears, that's what you need, ganza macher! That daffodil expects a contact from the Mahdi any minute—someone who's not to call from the lobby but who's to go directly to his room. He's got the words to get MacDonald to open the door, that's when we join the party and take them both! What did you have in mind? Breaking the door down courtesy of the Neanderthal here beside me?'

'Well, yes—’

'I don't need this, either,' muttered Grey quietly.

'No wonder you idiots blew it in Washington. You thought Password was a Mossad drop and not a television show!'

'Manny!'

'Get your secret ass up to the second floor! We'll be there in two minutes, right, Tinker Bell?'

'Mr. Weingrass,' said code Grey, the muscles of his lean, muscular jaw working furiously as he snapped off the radio. 'You are probably the most irritatingly vexatious man I have ever met.'

'Oy, such words! In the Bronx you would have been beaten up for that—if ten or twelve of my Irish or Italian buddies could have handled you. Come on!' Manny started across Government Road, followed by Grey, who kept shaking his head, not in disagreement but only to purge the thoughts he was thinking.

The hotel corridor was long, the carpet worn. It was the dinner hour and most of the guests were out. Weingrass stood at one end; he had tried to smoke a Gauloise but had crushed it out, burning a hole in the carpet, as it had started a devastating rumble in his chest. Ben-Ami was by the farthest elevator, the ever-present, irritated hotel guest waiting for a conveyance that never came. Code Grey was nearest to Room 202, leaning casually against the wall next to a door fifteen feet diagonally across the hall from 'Mr. Strickland's'. He was a professional; he assumed the posture of a young man eagerly awaiting a woman he was perhaps not meant to meet, even to the point of seeming to talk through the door.

It happened, and Weingrass was impressed. The uniformed doorman from the Tylos's marqueed entrance suddenly walked out of an elevator, his gold-braided cap in his hand; he approached Room 202. He stopped, knocked, waited for the chained door to be partially opened and spoke. The chain was unlatched. Suddenly, with the aggressive speed and purpose of an Olympic athlete, code Grey spun away from the wall, hurling himself at the two figures in the doorway, somehow managing to withdraw a handgun from some unseen place as he crashed his body, surging up laterally into his two enemies, his feet and arms, again somehow, pulling them together as one entity and sending them across the floor. Two muted shots erupted from the commando's pistol; the automatic in Anthony MacDonald's hand was blown away, as were two of his fingers.

Weingrass and Ben-Ami converged on the door and rushed inside, slamming it shut behind them.

'My God, look at me!' screamed the Englishman on the floor, grabbing his bleeding right hand. 'Jesus Christ! I have no—'

'Get a towel from the bathroom,' ordered Grey calmly, addressing Ben-Ami. The Mossad agent did as he was told by the younger man.

'I am only a messenger!' yelled the doorman, writhing next to the bed in fear. 'I was only to deliver a message!'

'The hell you're a messenger,' said Emmanuel Weingrass, standing over the man. 'You're perfect, you son of a bitch. You see who comes, who goes—you're their goddamned eyes. Oh, I want to talk to you.'

'I have no hand!' shrieked the obese MacDonald, the blood rolling in tiny rivers down his arm.

'Here!' said Ben-Ami, kneeling down and wrapping a towel around the Englishman's blown-apart fingers.

'Don't do that,' ordered code Grey, grabbing the towel and throwing it aside.

'You told me to get it,' protested Ben-Ami, confused.

'I've changed my mind,' said Grey, his voice suddenly cold, holding MacDonald's arm down, the blood now rushing out of his two stumped fingers. 'Blood,' continued the Masada commando speaking calmly to the Englishman, 'especially blood from the right arm—from the aorta expelling it from the heart—will have nowhere to go but on this floor. Do you read me, khanzeer? Do you understand me, pig? Tell us what we must know or be drained of life. Where is this Mahdi? Who is he?'

'I don't know!' shouted Anthony MacDonald coughing, tears rolling down his cheeks and jowls. 'Like everyone else I call telephone numbers—someone gets back to me! That's all I know!'

The commando's head snapped up. He was trained to hear things and sense vibrations others did not hear or sense. 'Get down! he whispered harshly to Ben-Ami and Weingrass. 'Roll to the walls! Behind chairs, anything!'

The hotel door crashed open. Three Arabs in sheer white robes, their faces concealed by cloth, lunged through the open space, their muted machine pistols on open-fire, their targets obvious: MacDonald and the Tylos doorman, whose screaming prostrate bodies thumped like jackhammers under the fusillade of bullets until no sounds came from their bleeding mouths. Suddenly the killers were aware of others in the room; they spun their weapons, slashing the air for new targets but there were none to be had for they were no competition for the lethal code Grey of the Masada Brigade. The commando had raced to the left of the open door, his back pressed into the wall, his Uzi ripped from the Velcro straps under his jacket. With a prolonged burst he cut down the three executioners instantly. There were no death-reflexes. Each skull was blown apart.

'Out!' shouted Grey, lurching to Weingrass and pulling the old man to his feet. 'To the staircase by the elevators!'

'If we're stopped,' added Ben-Ami, racing to the door, 'we're three people panicked by the gunfire.'

Out on Government Road, they rested in an alley that led to the Shaikh Hamad Boulevard, code Grey suddenly swore under his breath, more at himself than at his companions. 'Damn, damn, damn! I had to kill them!'

'You had no choice,' said the Mossad agent. 'One of their fingers on a trigger and we might all be dead, certainly one of us.'

'But with even one of them alive we could have learned so much,' countered the man from the Masada unit.

'We learned something, Tinker Bell,' said Weingrass.

'Will you stop that!'

'Actually, it's a term of affection, young man—’

'What did we learn, Manny?'

'MacDonald talked too much. In his panic the Englishman said things to people over the telephone he shouldn't have said so he had to be killed for a loose mouth.'

'How does that account for the doorman?' asked code Grey.

'Expendable. He got MacDonald's door open for the Mahdi's firing squad. Your gun made the real noise, they didn't… And now that we know about MacDonald's mouth and his execution, we can assume two vital facts—like the stress factors when you're designing an overhanging balcony on a building, one weight perched off centre on another off-centre gravity pitch.'

'What the hell are you talking about, Manny?'

'My boy, Kendrick, did a better job than he probably realizes. The Mahdi's frightened. He really doesn't know what's going on, and by killing the big mouth, now nobody can tell him. He made a mistake, isn't that something? The Mahdi made a mistake.'

'If your architectural schematics are as abstruse as you are, Mr. Weingrass,' said Grey, 'I hope none of your designs will be used for buildings in Israel.'

'Oh, the words that boy has! You sure you didn't go to the High School of Science in the Bronx? Never mind. Let's check out the scene at the Juma Mosque… Tell me, Tinker Bell, did you ever make a mistake?'

'I think I made one coming to Bahrain—’

The answer was lost on Emmanuel Weingrass. The old man was doubled over in a coughing seizure against the wall of the dark alleyway.

Stunned, Kendrick stared at the phone in his hand, then in anger slammed it down—anger and frustration and fear. You leave that royal house before morning and you are a dead man… Go quietly back to where you came from, where you belong. If he needed any final confirmation that he was closing in on the Mahdi, he had it, for all the good it did him. He was virtually a prisoner; one step outside the elegant town house and he would be shot on sight by men waiting for him to appear. Even his 'fumigated, laundered, and pressed' clothes would not be mistaken for anything but what they were: cleaned-up terrorist apparel. And the order for him to go back where he came from could hardly be taken seriously. He accepted the fact that there would be reluctance to kill an American congressman, even one whose presence in Bahrain could easily be traced to the horrors in Masqat, where he had once worked. An obliterated, bombed-out Oman as demanded by a large segment of the American people would not be in the Mahdi's interests—but neither could the Mahdi permit that congressman to return to Washington. The absence of hard evidence notwithstanding, he knew too much that others far more experienced in the black arts could put to advantage; the Mahdi's solution was all too obvious. The curious, interfering American would be one more victim of these terrible times—along with others, of course. A massacre at an airport terminal; a plane blown out of the sky; a bomb in a coffee shop—so many possibilities, as long as among those killed was a man who had learned too much.

At the end it was as he had conceived it in the beginning. Himself and the Mahdi. Himself or the Mahdi. Now he had lost, as surely as if he were in the shell of a building with a thousand tons of concrete and steel crashing down on him.

There was a sharp tapping at the door. ‘Odkluíl,' he said in Arabic, telling the visitor to come in, instinctively picking up his weapon from the white rug. The guard walked in, expertly balancing a large tray in the palm of his left hand. Evan shoved the gun under a pillow and stood up as the soldier carried his food to the white desk.

'All is in readiness, sir!' exclaimed the guard, no little triumph in his voice. 'I personally selected each item for its proper deliciousness. My wife tells me I should have been a chef rather than a warrior—’

Kendrick did not actually hear the rest of this warrior's paean to himself. Instead, he was suddenly mesmerized by the sight of the man. He was about six feet tall, give or take an inch, with respectable shoulders and an enviably trim waist. Except for that irritating waist, he was Evan's size or close to it. Kendrick glanced over at the clean, starched clothes on the chaise-lounge and then back at the colourful red and blue uniform of the frustrated chef-warrior. Without really thinking, Evan reached down for the hidden weapon as the soldier, humming like an Italian cudniere supremo, placed the steaming plates on the desk. The only thought that kept racing through Kendrick's mind was that a cleaned-up terrorist's outfit would be a target for a salvo of bullets, but not the uniform of a Bahrainian Royal Guard, especially one walking out of a royal house. Actually, there was no alternative. If he did nothing, he was dead in the morning—somewhere, somehow. He had to do something, so he did it. He walked around the outsized bed, stood behind the guard, and with all his strength smashed the handle of the gun into the soldier's bobbing, humming head.

The guard fell to the floor, unconscious, and again without really thinking, Evan sat down at the desk and ate faster than he had ever eaten in his life. Twelve minutes later, the soldier was bound and gagged on the bed as Kendrick studied himself in front of a closet mirror. The creased red and blue uniform might have been improved by the experienced fingers of a tailor, but withal and in the shadows of the evening streets, it was acceptable.

He ransacked the row of cupboards until he found a plastic shopping bag and stuffed his Masqat clothing into it. He looked at the telephone. He knew he would not use that phone, could not use it. If he survived the street outside, he would call Azra from another.

His jacket off, the shoulder holster in place, Azra angrily paced the room at the Aradous Hotel consumed by thoughts of betrayal. Where was Amal Bahrudi— the man with blue eyes who called himself Bahrudi? Was he in reality someone else, someone the foolish, bloated Englishman called 'Kendrick'? Was everything a trap, a trap to capture a member of Masqat's organization council, a trap to take the terrorist known as the Arabic Blue?… Terrorist? How typical of the Zionist killers from the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Haganah! How easily they erase the massacres of 'Jepthah' and Deir Yasin, to say nothing of their surrogate executioners at Sabra and Shatila! They steal a homeland and sell what is not theirs to sell, and kill a child for carrying the Palestinian flag—'an accident of excess', they call it—and yet we are the terrorists!… If the Aradous Hotel was a trap, he could not remain caged in the room; yet if it was not a trap, he had to be where he could be contacted. The Mahdi was everything, his summons a command, for he gave them the means for hope, for spreading their message of legitimacy. When would the world understand them? When would the Mahdis of the world be irrelevant?

The telephone rang and Azra raced to it. 'Yes?'

'I was delayed but I'm on my way. They found me; I was nearly killed at the airport but I escaped. They may even have traced you by now.'

'What?'

'Leaks in the system. Get out, but don't go through the lobby. There's a staircase designed for a fire exit. It's at the south end of the hallway, I think. North or south, one or the other. Use it and go through the restaurant's kitchen to the employees' exit. You'll come out on the Wadi Al Ahd. Walk across the road; I'll pick you up.'

'You are you, Amal Bahrudi? I can trust you?'

'Neither of us has a choice, do we?'

'That is not an answer.'

I'm not your enemy,' lied Evan Kendrick. 'We'll never be friends but I'm not your enemy. I can't afford it. And you're wasting time, poet, part of which is mine. I'll be there in five minutes. Hurry!'

‘I go—'

'Be careful.'

Azra hung up the phone and went to his weapons which he had cleaned repeatedly and placed in a neat row on the bureau. He took the small Heckler and Koch P9S automatic, knelt down, pulling up his left trouser leg, and inserted the weapon in the criss-crossing calf straps that rested below the back of his knee. Standing up he removed the larger, more powerful Mauser Parabellum pistol and shoved it into his shoulder holster, this followed by the sheathed hunting knife resting alongside the gun. He walked to a chair where he had thrown the coat of his newly purchased suit, put on the jacket and crossed to the door, rapidly letting himself out into the corridor.

Nothing would have seemed odd to him were it not for his concentration on the whereabouts of the staircase and his desire to save time—time now measured in minutes and segments of minutes. He started to his right, to the south end of the hallway, his eyes only partially aware of a door being closed, not an open door but one barely ajar. Meaningless: a careless guest; a Western woman carrying too many shopping boxes. Then, unable to see an exit sign for a staircase, he turned quickly to check the other end, the north end of the hallway. A second door, this one open no more than two inches, was closed swiftly, silently. The first was now no longer meaningless, for surely the second was not. They had found him! His room was being watched. By whom? Who were they? Azra continued walking, now to the north end of the corridor, but the instant he passed the second door he pivoted against the wall, reached inside his jacket for the long-bladed hunting knife, and waited. In seconds the door opened; he spun around the frame instantly facing a man he knew was his enemy, a deeply tanned, muscular man near his own age—desert training was written all over him, an Israeli commando! Instead of a weapon the startled Jew held a radio in his hand; he was unarmed!

Azra thrust the knife directly forward towards the Israeli's throat. In a lightning move the blade was deflected; the terrorist then arced it down, slicing into the Hebrew's wrist; the radio fell to the carpeted floor as Azra kicked the door shut; the automatic lock clicked.

Gripping his wrist, the Israeli lashed out his right foot, expertly catching the Palestinian's left kneecap. Azra stumbled; another steel toe caught him in the side of his neck, then still another crashed into his ribs. But the angle was right; the Israeli was off balance! The terrorist lunged, the knife an extension of his arm as he sent it directly into the commando's stomach. Blood erupted, covering Azra's face, as the Israeli, code name Orange of the Masada Brigade, fell back on the floor.

The Palestinian struggled to get up, sharp bolts of pain surging through his ribs and his knee, the tendons in his neck nearly paralysed. Suddenly, without a scratch or a footstep, the door crashed open, the hotel lock blown out of its mount. The second commando, younger, his thick bare arms bulging in tension, his furious eyes surveying the scene in front of him, whipped his hand beyond his right hip for a holstered weapon. Azra hurled himself against the Israeli, smashing the commando into the door slamming it shut. Code Blue's gun spiralled across the floor, freeing his right hand to intercept the Palestinian's arm as it slashed down with the blood-streaked blade of the knife. The Israeli hammered his knee up into the terrorist's rib cage as he swung the gripped arm clockwise, forcing Azra towards the floor. Still the Palestinian would not release the knife! Both men parted, crouching, staring at each other, contempt and hatred in both pairs of eyes.

'You want to kill Jews, try to kill me, pig!' cried Yaakov.

'Why not?' replied Azra, thrusting his knife forward to draw out the Israeli. 'You kill Arabs! You killed my mother and father as if you'd pulled the trigger yourself!'

'You killed my two brothers on the Sidon patrols!'

'I may have! I hope so! I was there!'

'You are Azra!'

Like two crazed animals the young men flung themselves at each other with violence incarnate, the taking of life—hated life—their only reason for being on earth. Blood burst out of punctured flesh as ligaments were torn and bones broken amid throated cries of vengeance and loathing. Finally it happened, the ending as volcanic as the initial eruption; sheer, brutal strength was the victor.

The knife was lodged in the terrorist's throat, reversed and forced to its mark by the commando from the Masada Brigade.

Exhausted and drenched in blood, Yaakov pushed himself off the body of his enemy. He looked over at his slain comrade, code Orange, and closed his eyes. 'Shalom,' he whispered. 'Find the peace we all seek, my friend.'

There was no time for mourning, he thought, as his eyes flashed open. The body of his comrade, as well as that of his enemy, had to be moved. He had to be at the source for what came next; he had to reach the others. The killer Azra was dead! They could now fly back to Masqat, they had to. To his father! In pain, Blue limped to the bed and yanked back the bedspread, revealing his dead comrade's Uzi machine pistol. He picked it up, awkwardly strapped it over his shoulder, and went to the door to check the hallway. His father!

In the far shadows of the Wadi Al Ahd, Kendrick knew he could not wait any longer, nor could he risk using a telephone. Conversely, he could not remain in the foliage opposite the Aradous and do nothing!. Time was winding down and the contact from the Mahdi expected to find the puppet Azra, newly crowned prince of terrorists, at the rendezvous. It was so clear now, he realized. He had been found out, either through the events at the airport or through a leak in Masqat—the panicked men from the past he had talked to, men who, unlike Mustapha, refused to see him and might have betrayed him for their own safety, as surely as one of them had killed Musty for the same reason. We cannot be involved! It's madness. Our families are dead! Our children raped, disfigured… dead!

The Mahdi's strategy was obvious. Isolate the American and wait for the terrorist to approach the meeting ground alone. Take the young killer, thus aborting the trap, for there is no trap without the American, only an expendable Palestinian on the loose. Kill him, but first find out what happened in Masqat.

Where was Azra? Thirty-seven minutes had passed since they talked; the Arab called Blue was thirty-two minutes late! Evan looked at his watch for the eleventh time and swore silently, furiously, his unspoken words at once a plea for help and an outburst of anger at the swirling clouds of frustration. He had to move, do something! Find out where Azra was, for without the terrorist there was no trap for the Mahdi, either. The Mahdi's contact would not show himself to someone he did not know, someone he did not recognize. So close! So far in the distance of reality!

Kendrick threw the plastic shopping bag containing his starched clothes from Masqat into the densest interior of the bushes bordering the pavement of the Wadi Al Ahd. He walked across the boulevard towards the employees' entrance, a postured, upright Royal Guard arrogantly on royal business. As he went rapidly down the cobblestone alley towards the service entrance, several of the departing servants bowed obsequiously, obviously hoping not to be stopped and searched for small treasures they had stolen from the hotel, namely, soap, toilet paper and morsels of food scraped from the plates of jet-lagged or drunken Westerners too far gone to eat. Standard procedure; Evan had been there; it was why he had chosen the Aradous Hotel. Again Emmanuel Weingrass. He and the unpredictable Manny had once fled the Aradous by way of the kitchen because a stepbrother of the Emir had heard that Weingrass had promised a stepsister of that royal brother citizenship in the United States if she would sleep with him—a privilege that Manny in no way could provide.

Kendrick passed through the kitchen, reached the south staircase and walked cautiously up the steps to the second floor. He withdrew the gun from under his scarlet jacket and opened the door. The corridor was empty and, indeed, it was the hour of the evening when affluent visitors to Bahrain were out in the cafes and the hidden casinos. He sidestepped down the left wall to Room 201, careful of every footstep. He listened; there was no sound. He knocked quietly.

'Odkhúloo,' said the voice in quiet Arabic, addressing not one, but more than one to enter.

Strange—wrong, thought Evan as he reached for the doorknob. Why the plural, why more than one? He turned the knob, spun back into the wall, and kicked the door open with his right foot.

Silence, as if the room were an empty cave, the eerie voice a disembodied recording. Gripping hard the unfamiliar, unwanted but necessary weapon, Kendrick slipped around the frame and went inside… Oh, God! What he saw made him freeze in horror! Azra was slumped against the wall, a knife embedded in his neck, his eyes wide in death, blood still dripping in rivulets down over his chest.

'Your friend, the pig, is dead,' said the quiet voice behind him.

Evan whipped around to face a young man as bloodied as Azra. The wounded killer leaned against the wall, barely able to stand, and in his hands was an Uzi machine pistol. 'Who are you?' whispered Kendrick. 'What the hell have you done?' he added, now shouting.

The man limped rapidly to the door and closed it, the weapon remaining on Evan. 'I killed a man who would kill my people as swiftly as he could find them, who would have killed me.'

'Good Christ, you're Israeli!'

'You're the American.'

'Why did you do it? What are you doing here?'

'It's not my choice.'

'That's no answer!'

'My orders are to give no answers.'

'You had to kill him?' cried Kendrick, turning and wincing at the sight of the dead, mutilated Palestinian.

'To use his words, “Why not?” They slaughter our children in school playgrounds, blow up planes and buses filled with our citizens, execute our innocent athletes in Munich, shoot old men in the head simply because all are Jews. They crawl up on beaches and murder our young, our brothers and sisters—why? Because we are Jews living finally on an infinitesimal strip of arid, wild land that we tamed. We! Not others.'

'He never had the chance—'

'Spare me, American! I know what's coming and it fills me with disgust. At the last it's the same as it has always been. Underneath, in whispers, the world still wants to blame the Jew. After everything that's been done to us, we're still the irksome troublemakers. Well, hear this, you interfering amateur, we don't want your comments or your guilt or your pity. We only want what belongs to us! We've marched out of the camps and the ovens and the gas chambers to claim what is ours.'

'Goddamn you!' roared Evan, gesturing angrily at the bleeding corpse of the terrorist. 'You sound like him! Like him! When will you all stop?’

'What difference does it make to you? Go back to your safe condominium and your fancy country club, American. Leave us alone. Go back where you belong.'

Whether it was the repeated words he had heard barely an hour ago over the phone, or the sudden images of cascading blocks of concrete crashing down on seventy-eight screaming, helpless loved ones, or the realization that the hated Mahdi was slipping away from him, he would never know. All he knew at that moment was that he hurled himself at the startled, wounded Israeli, tears of fury rolling down his cheeks. 'You arrogant bastard!' he screamed, ripping the Uzi out of the young man's grip and throwing it across the room, hammering the weakened commando against the wall. 'What right do you have telling me what to do or where to go? We watch you people kill each other and blow yourselves and everything else up in the name of blind credos! We spend lives and money, and exhaust brains and energy trying to instil a little reason, but no, none of you will move an inch! Maybe we should leave you alone and let you massacre each other, let the zealots hack each other to death, just so somebody's left who'll make some sense!' Suddenly, Kendrick broke away and raced across the room, picking up the Uzi. He returned to the Israeli, the weapon ominously levelled at the commando. 'Who are you and why are you here?'

'I am code name Blue. That is my response and I will give no other—’

'Code name what?

'Blue.'

'Oh, my God …" whispered Evan, glancing over at the dead Azra. He turned back to the Israeli and, without comment, handed the Uzi machine pistol to the stunned commando. 'Go ahead,' he said softly. 'Shoot up the fucking world. I don't give a damn.' With those words, Kendrick walked to the door and let himself out.

Yaakov stared after the American, at the closed door and then over at the corpse slumped on the floor against the wall. He angled the weapon down with his left hand and with his right pulled out the powerful miniaturized radio from his belt. He pressed a button.

'Itklem,' said the voice of code Black outside the hotel.

'Did you contact the others?'

'Code R did. They're here—or I should say I can see them walking up the Al Ahd now. Our elder colleague is with R; G is with the eldest, but something's wrong with the latter. G is holding him. How about you?'

'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. Whatever the case, 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 towards 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, wet lukewarm towels scattered about the bedspread.

'It's G,' said code Grey. '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 Grey. '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 Grey. '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 dark-skinned 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 five 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 grey. 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 armoury?'

'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 armoury—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 colour 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 towards 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 paralysed 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 latter 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 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, pummelled again to the floor.

'The executions have been moved forward,' 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.'