“Nassir?” asked Kendrick, hearing a rueful note in the young killer’s voice. “Nassir was weak?”
“He was a theoretician and not suited to this work.”
“A theoretician?” Evan arched his brows. “Our student is an analyst?”
“This student can determine those moments when active involvement must replace passive debate, when force takes over from words. Nassir talked too much, justified too much.”
“And you don’t?”
“I’m not the issue, you are. What proof of treason do you have?”
“The woman Yateem,” replied Kendrick, answering the first question, not the second one. “Zaya Yateem. I was told she was—”
“Yateem a traitor?” cried the terrorist, his eyes furious.
“I didn’t say that—”
“What did you say?”
“She was reliable—”
“Far more than that, Amal Bahrudi!” The young man grabbed the remaining cloth of Evan’s shirt. “She is devoted to our cause, a tireless worker who exhausts herself beyond any of us at the embassy!”
“She also speaks English,” said Kendrick, hearing still another note in the terrorist’s voice.
“So do I!” shot back the angry, self-proclaimed student, releasing his prisoner within their prison.
“I do, too,” said Evan quietly, glancing over at the numerous groups of inmates, many of whom were looking at them. “May we speak English now?” he asked, once more studying his bleeding shoulder. “You say you want proof, which, of course, is beyond my providing, but I can tell you what I’ve seen with my own eyes—in Berlin. You yourself can determine whether or not I’m telling you the truth—since you’re so adept at determining things. But I don’t want any of your brother animals understanding what I say.”
“You’re an arrogant man under circumstances that do not call for arrogance.”
“I am who I am—”
“You’ve said that.” The terrorist nodded. “English,” he agreed, switching from Arabic. “You spoke of Yateem. What about her?”
“You assumed I meant she was the traitor.”
“Who dares—”
“I meant quite the opposite,” insisted Kendrick, wincing, and gripping his shoulder with greater force. “She’s trusted, even extolled; she’s doing her job brilliantly. After Nassir, she was the one I was to find.” Evan gasped in pain, an all too easy reflex, and coughed out his next words. “If she had been killed … I was to look for a man who’s called Azra—if he was gone, another with gray streaks in his hair known as Ahbyahd.”
“I am Azra!” cried the dark-eyed student. “I am the one called Blue!”
Bingo, thought Kendrick, staring hard at the young terrorist, his eyes questioning. “But you’re here in this compound, not at the embassy—”
“A decision of our operations council,” broke in Azra. “Headed by Yateem.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Word reached us. Prisoners had been taken and held in isolation—tortured, bribed, broken one way or another into revealing information. It was decided that the strongest among us on the council should also be taken—to provide leadership, resistance!”
“And they chose you? She chose you?”
“Zaya knew whereof she spoke. She is my sister; I, her blood brother. She is as certain of my dedication as I am of hers. We fight together to our deaths, for death is our past.”
Jackpot! Evan arched his neck, his head falling against the hard concrete wall, his pained eyes roaming across the ceiling with the naked bulbs encased in wire. “So I meet my vital contact in the most impossible place possible. Allah may have deserted us after all.”
“To hell with Allah!” exclaimed Azra, astonishing Kendrick. “You’ll be released in the morning. There is no scar across your throat. You’ll be free.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” said Evan, wincing again and again grabbing his shoulder. “To put it plainly, that photograph of me was traced to a jihad cell in Rome and the scar is now questioned. They’re searching Riyadh and Manamah for my early dental and medical records. If any were overlooked, if any are found, I’ll be facing an Israeli hangman.… However, that’s not your concern, nor mine at the moment, frankly.”
“At least your courage matches your arrogance.”
“I told you before,” snapped Kendrick, “write poems on your own time.… If you are Azra, brother of Yateem, you need information. You have to know what I saw in Berlin.”
“The evidence of treason?”
“If not treason, utter stupidity, and if not stupidity, unforgivable greed, which is no less than treason.” Evan started once more to rise, pressing his back against the wall, his hands against the floor. This time the terrorist did not stop him. “Damn you, help me!” he cried. “I can’t think like this. I have to wash away the blood, clear my eyes.”
“Very well,” said the man called Azra haltingly, his expression conveying his intense curiosity. “Lean on me,” he added without enthusiasm.
“I only meant for you to help me up,” said Kendrick, yanking his arm away once he was on his feet. “I’ll walk by myself, thank you. I don’t need assistance from ignorant children.”
“You may need more assistance than I’m prepared to offer—”
“I forgot,” interrupted Evan, lurching, making his way awkwardly toward the row of four toilets and the sink. “The student is both judge and jury, as well as the right hand of Allah, whom he sends to the Devil!”
“Understand this, man of faith,” said Azra firmly, staying close to the arrogant, insulting stranger. “My war is not for or against Allah, Abraham or Christ. It is a struggle to survive and live like a human being despite those who would destroy me with their bullets and their laws. I speak for many when I say, Enjoy your faith, practice it, but do not burden me with it. I have enough to contend with in just trying to stay alive if only to fight one more day.”
Kendrick glanced at the angry young killer as they neared the sink. “I wonder if I should be talking to you,” he said, narrowing his swollen eyes. “I wonder if perhaps you are not the Azra I was sent to find.”
“Believe it,” replied the terrorist. “In this work, accommodations are made between people of many stripes, many different purposes, all taking from each other for very selfish reasons. Together we can accomplish more for our individual causes than we can separately.”
“We understand each other,” said Kendrick, no comment in his voice.
They reached the rusted iron sink. Evan turned on the single faucet of cold water at full force, then, conscious of the noise, reduced the flow as he plunged his hands and face into the stream. He splashed the water everywhere over his upper body, dousing his head and his chest and repeatedly around the bleeding wound in his shoulder. He prolonged the bathing, sensing Azra’s growing impatience as the Palestinian shifted his weight from foot to foot, knowing that the moment would come. The remaining taps are in the flushing mechanisms of the toilets. The moment came.
“Enough!” exploded the frustrated terrorist, gripping Kendrick’s unharmed shoulder and spinning him away from the sink. “Give me your information, what you saw in Berlin! Now! What is this proof of treason … or stupidity … or greed? What is it?”
“There has to be more than one person involved,” began Evan, coughing, each cough more pronounced, more violent, his whole body trembling. “As people leave they take them out—” Suddenly, Kendrick bent over, clutching his throat, lurching for the first toilet to the left of the filthy sink. “I’m retching!” he cried, grabbing the edges of the bowl with both hands.
“Take what out?”
“Films!” spat out Evan, his voice directed toward the area around the toilet’s handle. “Films smuggled out of the embassy!… For sale!”
“Films? Photographs?”
“Two rolls. I intercepted them, bought them both! Identities, methods—”
Nothing further could be heard in the enormous concret
e terrorist cell. Ear-shattering bells erupted; deafening sounds signaling an emergency reverberated off the walls as a group of uniformed guards rushed in, weapons leveled, eyes frantically searching. In seconds they spotted the object of their search; six soldiers bolted forward toward the row of toilets.
“Never!” screamed the prisoner known as Amal Bahrudi. “Kill me, if you wish, but you will learn nothing, for you are nothing!”
The first two guards approached. Kendrick lunged at them, hurling his body at the stunned soldiers, who thought they were rescuing an infiltrator about to be killed. He swung his arms and smashed his fists into the confused faces.
Mercifully, a third soldier hammered the stock of his rifle into the skull of Amal Bahrudi.
All was darkness, but he knew he was on the examining table in the prison laboratory. He could feel the cold compresses on his eyes and ice packs over various parts of his body; he reached up and removed the thick, wet compresses. Faces above him came into focus—bewildered faces, angry faces. He had no time for them!
“Faisal!” he choked, speaking Arabic. “Where is Faisal, the doctor?”
“I am down here by your left foot,” answered the Omani physician in English. “I’m sponging out a rather strange puncture wound. Someone bit you, I’m afraid.”
“I can see his teeth,” said Evan, now also speaking English. “They were like those of a saw-toothed fish—only yellow.”
“Proper diets are lacking in this part of the world.”
“Get everyone out, Doctor,” interrupted Kendrick. “Now. We’ve got to talk—now!”
“After what you did in there I doubt they’d leave, and I’m not even sure I’d let them. Are you crazy? They came to save your life and you tore into them, fracturing one man’s nose and breaking apart another’s bridgework.”
“I had to be convincing, tell them that—no, don’t. Not yet. Get them out. Tell them anything you like, but we’ve got to talk. Then you have to reach Ahmat for me.… How long have I been here?”
“Nearly an hour—”
“Christ! What time is it?”
“Four-fifteen in the morning.”
“Hurry! For God’s sake, hurry!”
Faisal dismissed the soldiers with calming words, reassuring them, explaining that there were things he could not explain. As the last guard went out the door, he paused, removed his automatic from its holster and handed it to the doctor. “Should I aim this at you while we talk?” asked the Omani after the soldier had left.
“Before sunrise,” said Kendrick, pushing away the ice packs and sitting up, painfully swinging his legs over the table. “I want a number of guns aimed at me. But not as accurately as they might be.”
“What are you saying? You can’t be serious.”
“Escape. Ahmat has to arrange an escape.”
“What? You are crazy!”
“Never saner, Doctor, and never more serious. Pick two or three of your best men, which means men you completely trust, and set up some kind of transfer—”
“Transfer?”
Evan shook his head and blinked his eyes, the swelling still apparent although reduced by the cold compresses. He tried to find the words he needed for the astonished doctor. “Let me put it this way: somebody’s decided to move a few prisoners from here to someplace else.”
“Who would do that? Why?”
“Nobody! You make it up and do it, don’t explain.… Do you have photographs of the men inside?”
“Of course. It’s normal arrest procedure, although the names are meaningless. When they’re given, they’re always false.”
“Let me have them, all of them. I’ll tell you whom to choose.”
“Choose for what?”
“The transfer. The ones you’re moving out of here to someplace else.”
“To where? Really, you’re not making sense.”
“You’re not listening. Somewhere along the way, a back street or a dark road outside the city, we’ll overpower the guards and escape.”
“Overpower …? We?”
“I’m part of the group, part of the escape. I’m going back in there.”
“Complete madness!” exclaimed Faisal.
“Complete sanity,” countered Evan. “There’s a man inside who can take me where I want to go. Take us where we have to go! Get me the police photographs and then reach Ahmat on the triple-five number. Tell him what I’ve told you, he’ll understand.… Understand, hell! It’s what that Ivy League juvenile delinquent had in mind from the beginning!”
“I think perhaps you did also, ya Shaikh ya Amreekánee.”
“Maybe I did. Maybe I just want to blame it on someone else. I don’t fit into this mold.”
“Then something inside is propelling you, reshaping the man who was. It happens.”
Kendrick looked into the soft brown eyes of the Omani doctor. “It happens,” agreed Evan. Suddenly his mind was filled with the outlines of a murky silhouette; the figure of a man emerged from the raging fires of an earthbound hell. Whirlwinds of smoke enveloped the apparition as cascading rubble fell all around it, muting the screams of victims. The Mahdi. Killer of women and children, of friends dear to him, partners in a vision—his family, the only family he ever wanted. All gone, all dead, the vision joining the smoke of destruction, disappearing in the rising vapors until nothing was left but the cold and the darkness. The Mahdi! “It happens,” repeated Kendrick softly, rubbing his forehead. “Get me the photographs and call Ahmat. I want to be back in that compound in twenty minutes, and I want to be taken out ten minutes later. For God’s sake, move!”
Ahmat, sultan of Oman, still in slacks and his New England Patriots T-shirt, sat in the high-backed chair, the red light of his private, secure telephone glowing below on the right leg of his desk. With the instrument next to his ear, he was listening intensely.
“So it happened, Faisal,” he spoke quietly. “Praise be to Allah, it happened.”
“He told me you expected it,” said the doctor over the line, his tone questioning.
“ ‘Expected’ is too strong, old friend. Hoped is more appropriate.”
“I removed your tonsils, great Sultan, and I attended you over the years for minor illnesses, including a great fear you had that proved groundless.”
Ahmat laughed, more to himself than into the phone. “A wild week in Los Angeles, Amal. Who knew what I might have contracted?”
“We had a pact. I never told your father.”
“Which means you think I’m not telling you something now.”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“Very well, old friend—” Suddenly, the young sultan snapped his head up as the door of his royal office was opened. Two women entered; the first was obviously pregnant, an Occidental from New Bedford, Massachusetts, blond, and wearing a bathrobe. His wife. Next to appear was an olive-skinned, dark-haired female dressed fashionably in street clothes. She was known to the household simply as Khalehla. “Beyond common sense, good Doctor,” continued Ahmat into the phone. “I have certain sources. Our mutual acquaintance needed assistance, and who better to provide it than the ruler of Oman? We leaked information to the animals at the embassy. Prisoners were being held somewhere, subjected to brutal interrogation. Someone had to be sent there to maintain discipline, order—and Kendrick found him.… Give our American anything he wants, but delay his schedule by fifteen or twenty minutes, until my two police officers arrive.”
“The Al Kabir? Your cousins?”
“Two special police will suffice, my friend.”
There was a brief silence, a voice searching for words. “The rumors are true, aren’t they, Ahmat?”
“I have no idea what you mean. Rumors are gossip and neither interests me.”
“They say you are so much wiser than your years—”
“That’s sophomoric,” broke in the sultan.
“He said you had to be to—‘run this place,’ ” he said. “It’s difficult for one who treated you for
mumps.”
“Don’t dwell on it, Doctor. Just keep me informed.” Ahmat reached into the drawer where the base of the private telephone lay and punched a series of numbers. Within seconds, he spoke. “I’m sorry, my family, I know you’re asleep, but I must again bother you. Go to the compound at once. Amal Bahrudi wants to escape. With fish.” He hung up.
“What’s happened?” asked the young sultan’s wife, rapidly walking forward.
“Please,” said Ahmat, his eyes on the stomach of his waddling spouse. “You have only six weeks to go, Bobbie. Move slowly.”
“He’s too much,” said Roberta Aldridge Yamenni, turning her head and addressing Khalehla at her side. “This jock of mine came in around two thousand in the Boston Marathon and he’s telling me how to carry a baby. Is that too much?”
“The royal seed, Bobbie,” replied Khalehla, smiling.
“Royal, my foot! Diapers are one hell of an equalizer. Ask my mother, she had four of us in six years.… Really, darling, what happened?”
“Our American congressman made contact in the compound. We’re mocking up an escape.”
“It worked!” cried Khalehla, approaching the desk.
“It was your idea,” said Ahmat.
“Please, forget it. I’m way out of line here.”
“Nothing’s out of line,” the youthful sultan said firmly. “Appearances notwithstanding, risks notwithstanding, we need all the help we can get, all the advice we can gather.… I apologize, Khalehla. I haven’t even said hello. As with my cousins, my lowly policemen, I’m sorry to drag you out at this hour, but I knew you’d want to be here.”
“Nowhere else.”
“How did you manage it? I mean leaving the hotel at four in the morning.”
“Thank Bobbie. I add, however, Ahmat, that neither of our reputations has been enhanced.”
“Oh?” The sultan looked at his wife.
“Great Lord,” intoned Bobbie, her palms together, bowing and speaking in her Boston accent. “This lovely lady is a courtesan from Cairo—nice ring to it, huh? Under the circumstances—” Here the royal wife outlined her swollen stomach with her hands and continued, “The privilege of rank has its goodies. Speaking as one of Radcliffe’s stellar history majors, which my former roommate here will attest to, Henry the Eighth of England called it ‘riding in the saddle.’ It happened when Anne Boleyn was too indisposed to accommodate her monarch.”