The Icarus Agenda

Chapter 15

'There's nothing here!' shouted Weingrass, standing and poring over the papers on the table in the dining room of a Bahrainian official he had known since the Kendrick Group had built an island country club on the archipelago years before. 'After all I did for you, Hassan, all the little and not so little fees I passed your way, this is what you give me?'

'More is coming, Emmanuel,' replied the nervous Arab, nervous because Weingrass's words were heard by Ben-Ami and the four commandos sitting twenty feet away in the Westernized living room on the outskirts of the city. A doctor had been summoned to stitch and bandage Yaakov, who refused to lie down; instead, he sat up in an armchair. The man named Hassan glanced at him, mentioning, if only to change the subject of his past with the old architect: 'The boy doesn't look well, Manny.'

'He gets in scraps, what can I tell you? Someone tried to steal his roller skates. What's coming and when? These are companies, and the products or services they sell. I have to see names, people!'

'That's what's coming. It's not easy to persuade the Minister of Industrial Regulations to leave his house at two o'clock in the morning and go down to his office to commit an illegal act.'

'Industrial and regulations in Bahrain are mutually exclusive words.'

'Those are secret papers!'

'A Bahrainian imperative.'

'That's not true, Manny!'

'Oh, shut up and get me a whisky."

'You're incorrigible, my old friend.'

'Tell me about it.' The voice of code Grey drifted out from the living room. He had returned from the telephone which he had been using with permission but without being questioned every fifteen minutes.

'May I get you something, gentlemen?' asked Hassan, walking through the dining room arch.

'The cardamom coffee is more than sufficient,' answered the older Ben-Ami. 'It's also delicious.'

'There are spirits, if you wish—as, of course, you've just gathered from Mr. Weingrass. This is a religious house but we do not impose our beliefs on others.'

'Would you put that in writing, sir?' said code Black, chuckling. ‘I’ll deliver it to my wife and tell her you're a mullah. I have to go across the city to get bacon with my eggs--'

'Thank you, but no spirits, Mr. Hassan,' added Grey, slapping Black's knee, 'With luck we'll have work to do tonight.'

'With greater luck my hands will not be cut off,' said the Arab quietly, heading towards the kitchen. He stopped, interrupted by the sound of the front door chimes. The high-placed courier had arrived.

Forty-eight minutes later, with computer print-outs scattered over the dining room table, Weingrass studied two specific pages, going back and forth from one to the other. 'Tell me about this Zareeba Limited.'

'The name comes from the Sudanese language,' replied the robed official who had refused to be introduced to anyone. 'Roughly, it translates as a protected encampment surrounded by rock or dense foliage.'

'The Sudan…?'

'It's a nation in Africa—’

'I know what it is. Khartoum.'

That's the capital—’

'Heavens, I thought it was Buffalo!' interrupted Weingrass curtly. 'How come they list so many subsidiaries?'

'It's a holding company; their interests are extensive. If a company needs government licences for multiple export and import, they're more easily expedited under the corporate umbrella of a very solid firm.'

'Horseshit.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'It's Bronx for “Oh, good gracious.” Who runs it?'

'There's a board of directors—’

'There's always a board of directors. I asked you who runs it.'

'No one really knows, frankly. The chief executive is an amiable fellow—I've had coffee with him—but he doesn't appear to be a particularly aggressive man, if you know what I mean.'

'So there's someone else.'

'I wouldn't know—’

'Where's the list of directors?'

'Right in front of you. It's beneath the page on your right.'

Weingrass lifted the page and picked up the one underneath. For the first time in two hours he sat down in a chair, his eyes roaming the list of names over and over again. 'Zareeba… Khartoum,' he kept saying quietly, every now and then shutting his eyes tightly, his lined face wrinkled by repeated grimaces as if he was trying desperately to recall something he had forgotten. Finally, he picked up a pencil and circled a name; then pushed the page across the table to the still standing, rigid Bahrainian official.

'He's a black man,' said the high-placed courier.

'Who's white and who's black over here?'

'One tells by the features usually. Of course, centuries of Afro-Arab intermingling often obscure the issue.'

'Is it an issue?'

'To some, not most.'

'Where did he come from?'

'If he's an immigrant, his country of origin is listed there. '

'It says “concealed”.'

'That generally means the person has fled from an authoritarian regime, usually Fascist or Communist. We protect such people if they contribute to our society. Obviously, he does.'

'Sahibe al Farrahkhaliffe,' said Weingrass, emphasizing each part of the name. 'What nationality is that?'

'I've no idea. Part African, obviously; part Arab, more obviously. It's consistent.'

'Wrongo, Buster!' exclaimed Manny, startling everyone in both rooms. 'It's pure American alias-fraud! If this is who I think he is, he's a black son of a bitch from Chicago who was heaved out by his own people! They got crapped on because he'd banked their money—some twenty million, incidentally—in accommodating banks on this side of the Atlantic. Some eighteen, twenty years ago he was a steamrolling, fire and brimstone fanatic called Al Farrah—his fucking ego wouldn't let him drop that part of his past, the hallelujah chorus part. We knew the big gloxinia was on the board of directors of some fat corporation but we didn't know which one. Besides, we were looking in the wrong direction. Khartoum? Hell! South Side Chicago! Here's your Mahdi.'

'Are you certain? asked Hassan, standing in the archway. 'The accusation is inflammatory!'

'I'm certain,' said Weingrass quietly. 'I should have shot the bastard in that tent in Basrah.'

'I beg your pardon?' The Bahrainian official was visibly shaken.

'Never mind—’

'No one has left the Sahalhuddin building!' said code Grey, walking forward into the archway.

'You're sure?'

'I paid a taxi driver who was very willing to accept a considerable sum of money with a great deal more to come if he did my bidding. I call him every few minutes at a public phone. Their two cars are still there.'

'Can you trust him?' asked Yaakov from the chair.

'I have his name and licence number.'

'Doesn't mean a damned thing!' protested Manny.

'I told him that if he lied, I'd find him and kill him.'

'I withdraw the statement, Tinker Bell.'

'Will you--'

'Shut up. What part of the Sahalhuddin does the Zareeba company occupy?'

'The top two floors, if I'm not mistaken. The lower floors are leased by its subsidiaries. Zareeba owns the building.'

'Convenient,' said Weingrass. 'Can you get us the updated structural plans, including the fire and security systems? I read those things pretty well.'

'At this hour?' cried the official. 'It's after three o'clock in the morning! I wouldn't know how—'

'Try a million dollars, American,' broke in Manny softly. ‘I’ll send it from Paris. My word.'

'What?'

'Split it up any way you like. That's my son in there. Get them.'

The small room was dark, the only light the white rays of the moon shining through a window high up on the wall—too high to reach, for there was no furniture except a low-slung cot with ripped canvas. A guard had left him a bottle of seeber-too ahbyahd, a numbing local whisky, suggesting that what faced him was better faced in a drunken stupor. He was tempted; he was frightened, the fear consuming him, causing him to sweat to the point where his shirt was drenched, his hair soaking wet. What stopped him from uncorking the bottle and draining it were the remnants of anger—and one last act he would perform. He would fight with all the violence he could summon, hoping, perhaps, in the back of his mind for a bullet that would end everything quickly.

Christ, why did he ever think he could do it? What possessed him to believe that he was qualified to do what far more experienced people thought was suicidal? Of course, the question was the answer: he was possessed. The hot winds of hate were burning him up; had he not tried they would have burned him out. And he had not failed entirely; he had lost his life but only because he had achieved a measure of success. He had proved the existence of the Mahdi! He had hacked a trail through the dense jungle of deceit and manipulation. Others would follow; there was comfort in that.

He looked at the bottle again, at the white liquid that would put him out of it. Unconsciously, he shook his head slowly back and forth. The Mahdi had said his gestures were as pathetic as his words. Neither would be pathetic on that plane flying over the shoals of Qatar.

Each soldier of the Masada Brigade had understood from the beginning and each checked the plastic tape around his left wrist to make certain the cyanide capsule was in its small, exposed bubble. None carried papers or any traces of identification; their 'working' clothes down to the shoes on their feet and the cheap buttons on their trousers were all purchased by Mossad agents in Benghazi, Libya, the core of terrorist recruitment. In these days of injected chemicals, the amphetamines and the scopolamines, no member of the Masada unit could permit himself to be captured alive where his actions could be even remotely connected to the events in Oman. Israel could not afford to be held responsible for the slaughter of two hundred and thirty-six American hostages, and the spectre of Israeli interference was to be avoided even at the cost of the unholy suicide of each man sent to Southwest Asia. Each understood; each had held out his wrist at the airfield in Hebron for the doctor to secure the ribbed plastic tape. Each had watched as the doctor swiftly brought his left hand to his mouth where hard teeth and the soft rounded bubble met. A quick puncture brought death.

The Tujjar was deserted, the street and lamps muted by pockets of mist drifting in from the Persian Gulf. The building known as the Sahalhuddin was dark except for several lighted offices on the top floor and, five storeys below, the dull wash of the foyer neons beyond the glass entrance doors where a bored man sat at a desk reading a newspaper. A small blue car and a large black one were parked at the curb. Two uniformed private guards stood casually in front of the doors, which meant that there was probably security at the rear of the building as well. There was a single man. Codes Grey, Black and Red returned to the broken-down taxi two hundred yards west at the corner of Al Mothanna Road. Inside, in the back seat, was the wounded Yaakov; in front, Ben-Ami and Emmanuel Weingrass, the latter still studying under the dashboard lights the structural plans of the building. Code Grey delivered the information through an open window; Yaakov issued their instructions.

'You, Black and Red, take out the guards and get inside. Grey, you follow with Ben-Ami and cut the wires—’

'Hold it, Eagle Scout!' said Weingrass, turning in the front seat. 'This Mossad relic sitting beside me doesn't know a damn thing about alarm systems except probably how to set 'em off.'

'That's not quite true, Manny,' protested Ben-Ami.

'You're going to trace pre-coded wires where they've been altered on purpose, heading to dummy receptacles just for people like you? You'd start an Italian festival down here! I'm going with them.'

'Mr. Weingrass,' pressed code Blue from the back seat. 'Suppose you begin coughing—have one of the attacks we've all sadly observed.'

'I won't,' answered the architect simply. 'I told you, that's my son in there.'

'I believe him,' said Grey at the window. 'And I'm the one who pays for it if I'm wrong.'

'You're coming around, Tinker Bell.'

'Will you please—'

'Oh, shut up. Let's go.'

If there had been a disinterested observer in the Tujjar at that hour, the following minutes would have appeared like the intricate movements of a large clock, each serrated wheel turning another which, in turn, sent motion back into the frenzied momentum of the mechanism, no cog, however, flying out of sequence or making a false move.

Codes Red and Black removed the two private guards in front before either knew there was a hostile presence within a hundred metres of him. Red took off his jacket, squeezed into the tunic of one of the guards, buttoned it, put on the visored cap, pulled it down and quickly ran back to the glass doors, where he tapped lightly, holding his backside with his left hand, pleading in the shadows with humorous gestures to be permitted inside to relieve himself. Frustrated bowels are a universal calamity; the man inside laughed, put down the newspaper and pressed a button on the desk. The buzzer was activated; codes Red and Black raced inside, and before the all-night receptionist understood the mistake he had made, he was unconscious on the marble floor. Code Grey followed, dragging a limp guard through the left door, which he caught before it swung shut, and behind him was Emmanuel Weingrass carrying Red's discarded jacket. On cue, code Black ran outside for the second guard as Weingrass held the door. All inside, codes Red and Grey bound and gagged the three security personnel behind the wide reception desk while Black took a long, capped syringe from his pocket; he removed the plastic casing, checked the contents level, and injected each unconscious Arab at the base of the neck. The three commandos then pulled the three immobile employees of the Sahal-huddin to the farthest reaches of the enormous foyer.

'Get out of the light!' whispered Red, the command directed at Weingrass. 'Go into the hall by the elevators!'

'What…?'

'I hear something outside!'

'You do?'

'Two or three people, perhaps. Quickly!'

Silence. And beyond the thick glass doors, two obviously drunken Americans weaved down the pavement, the words of a familiar melody more softly spoken than sung. To the tables down at Mary's, to the place we love so well…

'Son of a bitch, you heard them?' asked Weingrass, impressed.

'Go to the rear,' said Grey to Black. 'Do you know the way?'

'I read the plans, of course I do. I'll wait for your signal and take out the last one. My magic elixir is still half full.' Code Black disappeared into a south corridor as Grey raced across the Sahalhuddin's lobby; Weingrass was now in front of him heading for a steel door that led to the basement of the building.

'Shit!' cried Manny. 'It's locked!'

'To be expected,' said Grey, pulling a small black box from his pocket and opening it. 'It's not a problem." The commando removed a puttylike gel from the box, pressed it around the lock and inserted a one-inch string fuse. 'Stand back, please. It won't explode, but the heat is intense.'

Weingrass watched in amazement as the gel first became bright red upon firing, then the bluest blue he had ever seen. The steel melted before his eyes and the entire lock mechanism fell away. 'You're something, Tinker—’

'Don't say it!'

'Let's go,' agreed Manny. They found the security system; it was contained in a huge steel panel at the north end of the Sahalhuddin's underground complex. 'It's an upgraded Guardian,' pronounced the architect, taking a pair of wire cutters from his left pocket. 'There are two false receptacles for every six leads—each lead covering fifteen to twenty thousand square feet of possible entry—which, considering the size of the structure, means probably no more than eighteen wires.'

'Eighteen wires,' repeated Grey hesitantly. 'That means six false receptacles—’

'That's it, Tinker—forget it.'

'Thank you.'

'We cut one of those, we get a rock-muchacha band blaring in the street.'

'How can you tell? You said the pre-coded wires were altered—for amateurs like Ben-Ami. How can you tell?'

'Mechanics' courtesy, my friend. The slob-joes who work on this stuff hate like hell to read diagrams, so they make it easier for themselves or others who have to service the systems. On every false wire they make a mark, usually with pincer pliers high up towards the main terminal. That way they call in after fixing the system and say they spent an hour tracing the falsies because the diagrams weren't clear—they never are.'

'Suppose you're wrong, Mr. Weingrass? Suppose that here there was an honest “mechanic”?'

'Impossible. There aren't enough of them around,' replied Manny, taking a small torch and a chisel out of his right pocket. 'Come on, prise off the panel; we've got roughly eighty to ninety seconds to snip off twelve leads. Can you imagine? That cheap bastard, Hassan, said these batteries are weak. Go on!’

'I can use plastique,' said code Grey.

'And with that heat set off every alarm in the place including the sprinkler system? Meshuga! I'm sending you back to shul.'

'You're making me very upset, Mr—’

'Shut up. Do your job, I'll get you a badge.' The architect handed code Grey the chisel he had taken from Hassan, knowing it would be necessary from the plans of the Sahalhuddin's security. 'Do it quickly; these things are sensitive.'

The commando jammed the chisel below the panel's lock and with the strength of three normal men pressed forward, snapping the panel open. 'Give me the torch!' said the Israeli. 'You find the wires!'

One by anxious one Emmanuel Weingrass moved from right to left, the beam of light on each coloured wire. Eight, nine, ten… eleven. 'Where's twelve!' yelled Manny. 'I caught every false lead! There has to be one more! Without it they'll all trigger off!'

'Here. There's a mark here!' cried code Grey, touching the seventh wire. 'It's next to the third false lead. You missed it!'

'I got it!' Weingrass suddenly collapsed in a fit of coughing; he doubled over on the floor straining beyond his endurance to stop the seizure.

'Go ahead, Mr. Weingrass,' said Grey gently, touching the old man's thin shoulder. 'Let it out. No one can hear you.'

'I promised I wouldn't—'

'There are promises beyond our control of keeping, sir.'

'Stop being so fucking polite!' Manny coughed out his last spasm and awkwardly, painfully got to his feet. The commando purposely did not offer assistance. 'Okay, soldier-boy,' said Weingrass, breathing deeply. 'The place is secure—from our point of view. Let's find my boy.'

Code Grey held his place. 'Despite your less than generous personality, sir, I respect you,' said the Israeli. 'And for all our sakes, I can't permit you to accompany us.'

'You what?

'We don't know what's on the upper floors—’

I do, you son of a bitch! My boy's up there!… Give me a gun, Tinker Bell, or I'll send a telegram to Israel's Defence Minister telling him you own a pig farm!' Weingrass suddenly kicked the commando in the shins.

'Incorrigible!' muttered code Grey without moving his leg. 'Impossible!'

'Come on, bubbelah. A little gun. I know you've got one.'

'Please don't use it unless I tell you to,' said the commando, lifting his left trouser leg and reaching down for the small revolver strapped behind his knee.

'Actually, I never told you I was part of the Haganah?'

'The Haganah?'

'Sure. Me and Menachem had a lot of rough-and-tumbles—’

'Menachem was never part of the Haganah—'

'Must have been some other bald-headed fellow. Come on, let's go!'

Ben-Ami, the Uzi gripped in his hands in the shadows of the Sahalhuddin's entrance, kept in touch by radio. 'But why is he with you?' asked the Mossad agent.

'Because he's impossible!' replied the irritated voice of code Grey.

'That's not an answer!' insisted Ben-Ami.

'I have no other. Out. We've reached the sixth floor. I'll contact you when it's feasible.'

'Understood.'

Two of the commandos flanked the wide double doors on the right of the landing; the third stood at the other end of the hall, outside the only other door with light showing through the crack below. Emmanuel Weingrass reluctantly remained on the marble staircase; his anxiety provoked rumblings in his chest but his resolve suppressed them.

'Now!' whispered code Grey, and both men crashed the door open with their shoulders, instantly dropping to the floor as two robed Arabs at each end of the room turned, firing their repeating weapons. They were no match for the Uzis; both fell with two bursts from the Israeli machine pistols. A third and a fourth man started to run, one in white robes from behind the enormous ebony desk, the other from the left side.

'Stop!' yelled code Grey. 'Or you're both dead!'

The dark-skinned man in the robes of a lavish aba stood motionless, his glowering eyes riveted on the Israeli. 'Have you any idea what you've done? he asked in a low, threatening voice. 'The security in this building is the finest in Bahrain.’

The authorities will be here in minutes. You will lay down your weapons or you will be killed.'

'Hello there, garbage!’ yelled Emmanuel Weingrass, walking into the room with effort as old men do when their legs do not work as well as they once did, especially after a great deal of excitement. 'The system's not that good, not when you've sub-contracted five or six hundred.'

'You!'

'Who else? I should have blown you away years ago in Basrah. But I knew my boy would come back to find you, you scum of the earth. It was just a matter of time. Where is he?'

'My life for his.'

'You're in no position to bargain—’

'Perhaps I am,' broke in the Mahdi. 'He's on his way to an unmarked airfield where a plane will fly him out to sea. Destination—the shoals of Qatar.'

'The sharks,' said Weingrass quietly, in cold fury.

'Ever so. One of nature's conveniences. Now do we bargain? Only I can stop them.'

The old architect, his frail body trembling as he breathed deeply, stared at the tall, robed black man, his voice strained as he replied. 'We bargain,' he said. 'And by Almighty God you'd better deliver or I'll hunt you down with an army of mercenaries.'

'You were always such a melodramatic Jew, weren't you?' The Mahdi glanced at his watch. 'There's time. As is the custom on such flights, there can be no ground-to-air radio contact, no subsequent forensic examinations of a plane. They're scheduled to take off with the first light. Once outside I'll place the call; the aircraft will not leave, but you and your little army of whatever-they-are will.'

'Don't even think about any tricks, you scum ball… We deal.'

'No!' Code Grey whipped out his knife and lunged at the Mahdi, gripping his robes and throwing him over the desk. 'There are no bargains, no deals, no negotiations whatsoever. There's only your life at this moment!' Grey shoved the point of his blade into the flesh below the Chicagoan's left eye. The Mahdi screamed as the blood rolled down his cheek and into his open mouth. 'Make your call now or lose first this eye, then the other! After that it won't matter to you where my knife goes next; you won't see it.' The commando reached over, grabbed the phone on the desk and slammed it down beside the bleeding head. 'That's your bargain, scum! Give me the number. I'll dial it for you—just to make sure it's an airfield and not some private barracks. Give it to me!'

'No-no, I can't!'

'The blade goes in!'

'No, stop! There is no airfield, no plane!'

'Liar!'

'Not now. Later!'

'Lose your first eye, liar!'

'He's here! My God, stop! He's here!'

'Where?' roared Manny, rushing up to the desk.

'The west wing… there's a staircase in the hall on the right, a small storage area below the roof—'

Emmanuel Weingrass did not hear any more. He raced out of the room, screaming with all the breath that was in him. 'Evan! Evan…!'

He was hallucinating, thought Kendrick; a person dear to him from the past was calling to him, giving him courage. The singular privilege of a condemned man, he considered. He looked up from the cot at the window; the moon was moving away, its light fading. He would not see another moon. Soon there would be nothing but darkness.

'Evan! Evan!'

It was so like Manny. He had always been there when his young friend needed him. And here at the end he was there to give comfort. Oh, Lord, Manny, I hope you learn somehow that I came back! That finally I listened to you. I found him, Manny! Others will, too, I know it! Please be a little proud of me—

'Goddamn it, Kendrick! Where the hell are you?'

That voice was no hallucination! Nor were the pounding footsteps on the narrow staircase! And other footsteps! Jesus Christ, was he already dead? 'Manny…? Manny?' he screamed.

'Here it is! This is the room! Break it down, musclehead!'

The door of the small room crashed open like a deafening crack of thunder.

'Goddamn, boy!' cried Emmanuel Weingrass, seeing Kendrick stagger up from his cell cot. 'Is this any way for a respectable congressman to behave? I thought I taught you better!'

Tears in their eyes, father and son embraced.

They were all in Hassan's Westernized living room on the outskirts of the city. Ben-Ami had monopolized the telephone since Weingrass relinquished it after a lengthy call to Masqat and a spirited conversation with the young sultan, Ahmat. Fifteen feet away, around the large dining room table, sat seven officials representing the governments of Bahrain, Oman, France, the United Kingdom, West Germany, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. As agreed, there was no representative from Washington, but there was nothing to fear in terms of America's clandestine interests where a certain congressman was concerned. Emmanuel Weingrass was at that table, sitting between the Israeli and the man from the PLO.

Evan was next to the wounded Yaakov, both in armchairs beside each other, a courtesy for the two most in pain. Code Blue spoke. 'I listened to your words at the Aradous,' he said softly. 'I've been thinking about them.'

'That's all I ask you to do.'

'It's hard, Kendrick. We've been through so much, not me, of course, but our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers—’

'And generations before them,' added Evan. 'No one with a grain of intelligence or sensitivity denies it. But in a way, so have they. The Palestinians weren't responsible for the pogroms or the Holocaust, but because the free world was filled with guilt—as it damn well should have been—they became the new victims without knowing why.'

'I know.' Yaakov nodded his head slowly. 'I've heard the zealots in the West Bank and the Gaza. I've listened to the Meir Kahanes and they frighten me so—’

'Frighten you?'

'Of course. They use the words that were used against us, for, as you say, generations… Yet still, they kill! They killed my two brothers and so many countless others!'

'It's got to stop sometime. It's all such a terrible waste.'

'I have to think.'

'It's a beginning.'

The men around the dining room table abruptly rose from their chairs. They nodded to one another and, one by one, walked through the living room to the front door and out to their staff cars without acknowledging the presence of anyone else in the house. The host, Hassan, came through the archway and addressed his last guests. At first it was difficult to hear his words, as Emmanuel Weingrass was doubled up with a coughing seizure in the dining room. Evan started to rise. Yaakov, shaking his head, gripped Kendrick's arm. Evan understood; he nodded and sat back.

'The American Embassy in Masqat will be relieved in three hours, the terrorists granted safe escort to a ship on the waterfront provided by Sahibe al Farrahkhaliffe.'

'What happens to him? asked Kendrick angrily.

'In this room, and only in this room, will that answer be given. I am instructed by the Royal House to inform you that it is to go no further. Is that understood and accepted?'

All heads nodded.

'Sahibe al Farrahkhaliffe, known to you as the Mahdi, will be executed without trial or sentence, for his crimes against humanity are so outrageous they do not deserve the dignity of jurisprudence. As the Americans say, we'll do it “our way”.'

'May I speak?' said Ben-Ami.

'Of course,' answered Hassan.

'Arrangements have been made for me and my colleagues to be flown back to Israel. Since none of us has passports or papers, a special plane and procedures have been provided by the Emir. We must be at the airport concourse within the hour. Forgive us for our abrupt departure. Come along, gentlemen.'

'Forgive us,' said Hassan, nodding. 'For not having the wherewithal to thank you.'

'Have you got any whisky?' asked code Red.

'Anything you wish.'

'Anything you can part with. It's a long, terrible trip back and I hate flying. It frightens me.'

Evan Kendrick and Emmanuel Weingrass sat next to each other in the armchairs in Hassan's living room. They waited for their instructions from a harried, bewildered American ambassador, who was permitted to make contact only by telephone. It was as though the two old friends had never been apart—the oft-times bewildered student and the strident teacher. Yet the student was the leader, the shaker; and the teacher understood.

'Ahmat must be up in space with relief,' said Evan, drinking brandy.

'A couple of things are keeping him grounded.'

'Oh?'

'Seems there's a group that wanted to get rid of him, send him back to the States because they thought he was too young and inexperienced to handle things. He called them his arrogant merchant princes. He's bringing them to the palace to straighten them out.'

'That's one item. What else?'

'There's another bunch who wanted to take things in their own hands, blow up the embassy if they had to, anything to get their country back. They're machine-gun nuts; they're also the ones who were recruited by Cons Op to get you out of the airport.'

'What's he going to do about them?'

'Not a hell of a lot unless you want your name shouted from the minarets. If he calls them in, they'll scream State Department connections and all the crazies in the Middle East will have another cause.'

'Ahmat knows better. Let them alone.'

'There's a last item and he's got to do it for himself. He's got to blow that boat out of the water, and kill every one of those filthy bastards.'

'No, Manny, that's not the way. The killing will just go on and on—’

'Wrong!' shouted Weingrass. 'You're wrong! Examples must be made over and over again until they all learn the price they have to pay!' Suddenly the old architect was seized by a prolonged, echoing, rattling cough that came from the deepest, rawest cavities of his chest. His face reddened and the veins in his neck and forehead were blue and distended.

Evan gripped his old friend's shoulder to steady him. 'We'll talk about it later,' he said as the coughing subsided. 'I want you to come back with me, Manny.'

'Because of this? Weingrass shook his head defensively. 'It's just a chest cold. Lousy weather in France, that's all.'

'I wasn't thinking of that,' lied Kendrick, he hoped convincingly. 'I need you.'

'What for?'

'I may be going into several projects and I want your advice.' It was another lie, a weaker one, so he added quickly, 'Also I want to completely redesign my house.'

'I thought you just built it.'

'I was involved with other things and wasn't paying attention. It's terrible; I can't see half the things I was supposed to see, the mountains and the lakes.'

'You never were any damned good reading exterior schematics.'

'I need you. Please.'

'I have business in Paris. I've got to send out money. I gave my word.'

'Send mine.'

'Like a million?'

'Ten, if you like. I'm here and not in some shark's stomach… I'm not going to beg you, Manny, but please, I really do need you.'

'Well, maybe for a week or two,' said the irascible old man. 'They need me in Paris, too, you know.'

'Gross profits will drop all over the city, I know that,' replied Evan softly, relieved.

'What?'

Fortunately the telephone rang, preventing Kendrick from having to repeat his statement. Their instructions had arrived.

I'm the man you never met, never spoke to,' said Evan into the pay phone at Andrews Air Force Base in Virginia. 'I'm heading out to the white water and the mountains where I've been for the past five days. Is that understood?'

'Understood,' answered Frank Swann, deputy director of the State Department's Consular Operations. 'I won't even try to thank you.'

'Don't.'

'I can't. I don't even know your name.'

Ultra Maximum Secure

No Existing Intercepts

Proceed

The figure sat hunched over the keyboard, his eyes alive, his mind alert, though his body was racked with exhaustion. He kept breathing deeply as if each breath would keep his brain functioning. He had not slept for nearly forty-eight hours, waiting for developments out of Bahrain. There had been a blackout, a suspension of communications… silence. The small circle of need-to-know personnel at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency may now themselves be breathing deeply, he considered, but not before. Instead, they had been holding their collective breath. Bahrain represented the irreversible, hard edge of finality, the ending unclear. Not any longer. It was over, the subject airborne. He had won. The figure proceeded to type.

Our man has done it. My appliances are ecstatic, for although they refused to commit themselves, they indicated that he could succeed. In their inanimate way they saw my vision.

The subject arrived here this morning under deep cover thinking that everything is finished, that his life will return to its abnormal normalcy, but he is wrong. Everything is in place, the record written. The means must be found and they will be found. Lightning will strike and he will be the bolt that changes a nation. For him it is only the beginning.

Book Two

Ultra Maximum Secure No Existing Intercepts Proceed

The means have been found! As in the ancient Vedic scriptures, a god of fire has arrived as a messenger to the people. He has made himself known to me and I to him. The Oman file is now completed. Everything! And I have obtained everything through access and penetration and I have given everything to him. He's a remarkable man, as I realistically believe I am, and he has a dedication that matches my own.

With the file completed and entered in its entirety, this journal is finished. Another is about to begin.