“Naturalmente!” roared the unknown Luigi in triumph. “My dearest friend in all my life! Signor Weingrass. My Hebrew brother who speaks the language of Como and Lago di Garda like a native—not the Boot or even napoletano; barbarians, you understand—he is in front of my eyes!”
“Would you please ask him to come to the telephone. Please.”
“He is very engrossed, signore. His lady is winning a great deal of money. It is not good fortuna to interfere.”
“Tell that bastard to get on this phone right now or his Hebrew balls will be put in boiling Arabian goat’s milk!”
“Che cosa?”
“Do as I say! Tell him the name is Mossad!”
“Pazzo!” said Luigi to no one, placing the telephone on his lectern. “Instabile!” he added, cautiously stepping forward toward the screaming craps table.
Emmanuel Weingrass, his perfectly waxed mustache below an aquiline nose that bespoke an aristocratic past and his perfectly groomed white hair that rippled across his sculptured head, stood quietly amid the gyrating bodies of the frenetic players. Dressed in a canary-yellow jacket and a red-checkered bow tie, he glanced around the table more interested in the gamblers than in the game, every now and then aware that an idle player or one of the excited crowd of onlookers was staring at him. He understood, as he understood most things about himself, approving of some, disapproving of many, many more. They were looking at his face, somewhat more compact than it might be, an old man’s face that had not lost its childhood configurations, still young no matter the years and aided by his stylish if rather extreme clothing. Those who knew him saw other things. They saw that his eyes were green and alive, even in blank repose, the eyes of a wanderer, both intellectually and geographically, never satisfied, never at peace, constantly roving over landscapes he wanted to explore or create. One knew at first glance that he was eccentric; but one did not know the extent of the eccentricity. He was artist and businessman, mammal and Babel. He was himself, and to his credit he had accepted his architectural genius as part of life’s infinitely foolish game, a game that would involuntarily end for him soon, hopefully while he was asleep. But there were things to live, to experience while he was alive; by his account, approaching eighty, he had to be realistic, as much as it annoyed and frightened him. He looked at the garishly voluptuous girl beside him at the table, so vibrant, so vacuous. He would take her to bed, perhaps fondle her breasts—and then go to sleep. Mea culpa. What was the point?
“Signore?” whispered the tuxedoed Italian into Weingrass’s ear. “There is a telephone call for you, someone I could never in my life have respect for.”
“That’s a strange remark, Luigi.”
“He insulted you, my dear friend and most considerate guest. If you wish, I will dismiss him in the language of barbarians which he so justly deserves.”
“Not everyone loves me as you do, Luigi. What did he say?”
“What he said I would not repeat in front of the grossest French croupier here!”
“You’re very loyal, my friend. Did he give you his name?”
“Yes, a Signor Mossad. And I tell you he is deranged, pazzo!”
“Most of them are,” said Weingrass as he walked quickly to the telephone.
10
The early light progressively threatened. Azra looked up at the morning sky, swearing at himself—including the rough-hewn Yosef in his oaths—for taking a wrong turn at the Kabritta Tower and thus wasting precious minutes. The three fugitives had torn off their prison trousers high above the ankles, at mid-calf, and the sleeves away from their shoulders. Without the benefit of sunlight they could pass for laborers brought in from Lebanon or the slums of Abu Dhabi, spending their rials on the only recreation accessible to them: the whores and the whisky available in the el Shari el Mishkwiyis, that landlocked island of the city.
They were in the recessed concrete employees’ entrance of the Waljat Hospital less than two hundred yards away from the gates of the American embassy. A narrow street on the right intersected the broad thoroughfare. Angling around the corner was a line of shops, indistinguishable behind their iron shutters. All business was suspended while the madness lasted. In the distance, inside the gates of the embassy, were ragtag squads of lethargic young people walking slowly, the weight of their weapons dragging their arms and shoulders down, doing what they were ordered to do for their jihad, their holy war. The lethargy, however, would vanish with the first rays of the sun, and manic energy would erupt with the first wave of onlookers, especially the radio and television crews—mainly because of those crews. The angry children were about to go onstage within the hour.
Azra studied the large square in front of the gates. Across the way on the north side stood three white two-story office buildings close to one another. The curtained windows were dark, no signs of light anywhere, which was immaterial in any event. If there were men inside watching, they were too far away from the gates to hear what he would say softly through the bars, and the light was still too dim for him to be definitely identified—if indeed word of their escape had reached the post. And even if it had, the enemy would not mount a rash attack on the basis of vague possibilities; the consequences were too deadly. Actually, the square was deserted except for a row of beggars, their clothes in shreds, squatting in front of the embassy’s sandstone walls, their alms plates in front, several with their own excrement in evidence. The filthiest of these outcasts were not potential agents of the sultan or of foreign governments, but others might be. He focused his eyes on each of the latter, looking for sudden, abrupt movements that would betray a man not used to a beggar’s locked, hunkered stance. Only someone whose muscles were trained to withstand the interminable stress of a beggar’s squat could remain immobile for any length of time. None moved, none squeezed a leg; it was not proof but it was all he could ask for. Azra snapped his fingers at Yosef, removing the MAC-10 weapon from under his shirt and thrusting it toward the older terrorist.
“I’m going over,” he said in Arabic. “Cover me. If any of those beggars make un unbeggarly move, I expect you to be there.”
“Go ahead. I’ll swing out behind you in the hospital’s shadow and slip from doorway to doorway on the right side. My aim is unequaled, so if there’s one unbeggarly move, there is no beggar!”
“Don’t anticipate, Yosef. Don’t make a mistake and fire when you shouldn’t. I have to reach one of those imbeciles inside. I’ll stumble down as though it wasn’t the best morning of my life.” The young Palestinian turned to Kendrick, who was crouched in the sparse foliage by the hospital wall. “You, Bahrudi,” he whispered in English. “When Yosef reaches the first building over there, come out slowly and follow him, but for God’s sake, don’t be obvious! Pause now and then to scratch yourself, spit frequently, and remember that your appearance doesn’t belong to someone with good posture.”
“I know those things!” Evan lied emphatically, impressed with what he was learning about terrorists. “You think I haven’t employed such tactics a thousand times more than you have?”
“I don’t know what to think,” answered Azra simply. “I do know that I didn’t like the way you walked past the Zawawi Mosque. The mullahs and the muezzins were congregating.… Perhaps you’re better in the refined capitals of Europe.”
“I assure you I’m adequate,” said Kendrick icily, knowing he had to retain the Arabic version of strength, which came with cold understatement. His playacting was quickly deflated, however, as the young terrorist grinned. It was a genuine smile, the first he had observed in the man who called himself Blue.
“I’m assured,” said Azra, nodding his head. “I’m here and not a corpse in the desert. Thank you for that, Amal Bahrudi. Now keep your eyes on me. Go where I direct you.”
Pivoting swiftly, Blue rose and walked haltingly across the hospital’s short stretch of zoysia lawn and into the wide thoroughfare that led to the square proper. Within seconds, Yosef raced out, ninety degrees to the right of his sup
erior, crossing the narrow street twenty feet from the corner, hugging the side of the building in the dim light’s darkest shadows. As the lone, isolated figure of Azra came into clear view staggering toward the embassy gates, Yosef spun around the corner; the last object Evan saw was the murderous MAC-10 machine pistol, held low in his left hand by the blunt sergeant-foreman. Kendrick knew it was the moment to move, and a part of him suddenly wished he were back in Colorado, southwest of Telluride at the base of the mountains and at temporary peace with the world. Then the images came again, filling his inner screen: Thunder. A series of deafening explosions. Smoke. Walls suddenly collapsing everywhere amid the screams of terrified children about to die. Children! And women—young mothers—shrieking in horror and protest as tons of rubble came cascading down from a hundred feet above the earth. And helpless men—friends, husbands, fathers—roaring defiantly against the cascading hell they knew instantly would be their tomb.… The Mahdi!
Evan got to his feet, breathed deeply, and started out toward the square. He reached the north-side pavement in front of the barricaded shops, his shoulders bent; he paused frequently to scratch himself and spit.
“The woman was right,” whispered the dark-skinned Arab in Western clothes peering out through a loose slat in a boarded-up store that only twenty-two days ago had been an attractive café devoted to selling cardamom coffee, cakes and fruit. “The older pig was so close I could have touched him as he passed by! I tell you, I did not breathe.”
“Shhh!” warned the man at his side in full Arab dress. “Here he comes. The American. His height betrays him.”
“Others will betray him also. He will not survive.”
“Who is he?” asked the robed man, his whispered voice barely audible.
“It’s not for us to know. That he risks his life for us is all that matters. We listen to the woman, those are our orders.” Outside, the stooped figure in the street passed the store, pausing to scratch his groin while spitting into the curb. Beyond, diagonally across the square, another figure, blurred in the dim light, approached the embassy gates. “It was the woman,” continued the Arab in Western clothes, still squinting between the loose boards, “who told us to watch for them on the waterfront, checking the small boats, and on the roads north and south, even here where they were least expected. Well, reach her and tell her the unexpected has happened. Then call the others on the Kalbah and Bustafi Wadis and let them know they needn’t watch any longer.”
“Of course,” said the robed man, starting toward the back of the deserted dark café with its profusion of chairs eerily perched on top of tables as if the management expected unearthly customers who disdained the floor. Then the Arab stopped, quickly returning to his colleague. “Then what do we do?”
“The woman will tell you. Hurry! The pig by the gates is gesturing for someone inside. That’s where they’re going. Inside!”
Azra gripped the iron bars, his eyes darting up at the sky; the sprays of light were growing brighter by the minute in the east. Soon the dull dark gray of the square would be replaced by the harsh, blinding sun of Masqat; it would happen at any moment, as it did every dawn, an explosion of light that was suddenly total, all-encompassing. Quickly! Pay attention to me, you idiots, you mongrels! The enemy is everywhere, watching, scanning, waiting for the instant to pounce, and I am now a prize of extraordinary value. One of us must reach Bahrain, reach the Mahdi! For the love of your goddamned Allah, will somebody come over here? I cannot raise my voice!
Someone did! A youngster in soiled fatigues broke hesitantly away from his five-man squad, squinting in the still-dim but growing light, drawn by the sight of the odd-looking person at the left side of the huge chained double gate. As he drew nearer he walked faster, his expression slowly changing from the quizzical to the astonished.
“Azra?” he cried. “Is it you?”
“Be quiet!” whispered Blue, pressing both palms repeatedly through the bars. The teenager was one of the dozens of recruits he had instructed in the basic use of repeating weapons and, if he remembered correctly, not a prize pupil among so many just like him.
“They said you had gone on a secret mission, an assignment so holy we should thank almighty Allah for your strength!”
“I was captured—”
“Allah be praised!”
“For what?”
“For your having slain the infidels! If you had not, you would be in the blessed arms of Allah.”
“I escaped—”
“Without slaying the infidels?” asked the youngster, sadness in his voice.
“They’re all dead,” replied Blue with exasperated finality. “Now, listen to—”
“Allah be praised!”
“Allah be quiet—you be quiet and listen to me! I must get inside, quickly. Go to Yateem or Ahbyahd—run as if your life depended on it—”
“My life is nothing!”
“Mine is, damn it! Have someone come back here with instructions. Run!”
The waiting produced a pounding in Blue’s chest and temples as he watched the sky, watched the light in the east about to inflame this infinitesimal part of the earth, knowing that when it did he would be finished, dead, no longer able to fight the bastards who had stolen his life, erased his childhood with blood, taken his and Zaya’s parents away in a burst of gunfire sanctioned by the killers of Israel.
He remembered it all so clearly, so painfully. His father, a gentle, brilliant man who had been a medical student in Tel Aviv until, in his third year, the authorities deemed he was better suited to the life of a pharmacist so as to make room for an immigrating Jew in the medical college. It was common practice. Erase the Arabs from the esteemed professions, was the Israeli credo. As the years went on, however, the father became the only “doctor” in their village on the West Bank; the government’s visiting physicians from Be’er Sheva were incompetents who were forced to make their shekels in the small towns and the camps. One such physician complained, and it was as if the writing were stamped on the Wailing Wall. The pharmacy was shut down.
“We have our unspectacular lives to live; when will they let us live them?” the father and husband had screamed.
The answer came for a daughter named Zaya and a son who became Azra the Terrorist. The Israeli Commission of Arab Affairs on the West Bank again made a pronouncement. Their father was a troublemaker. The family was ordered out of the village.
They went north, toward Lebanon, toward anywhere that would accept them, and along the journey of their exodus, they stopped at a refugee camp called Shatila.
While brother and sister watched from behind the low stone wall of a garden, they saw their mother and father slaughtered, as were so many others, their bodies broken by staccato fusillades of bullets, snapping them into the ground, blood spewing from their eyes and their mouths. And up above, in the hills, the sudden thunder of Israeli artillery was to the ears of children the sound of unholy triumph. Someone had very much approved of the operation.
Thus was born Zaya Yateem, from gentle child to ice-cold strategist, and her brother, known to the world as Azra, the newest crown prince of terrorists.
The memories stopped with the sight of a man running inside the gates of the embassy.
“Blue!” cried Ahbyahd, the streaks of white in his hair apparent in the growing light, his voice a harsh, astonished whisper as he raced across the courtyard. “In Allah’s name, what happened? Your sister is beside herself but she understands that she cannot come outside, not as a woman, not at this hour, and especially not with you here. Eyes are everywhere—what happened to you?”
“I’ll tell you once we’re inside. There’s no time now. Hurry!”
“We?”
“Myself, Yosef and a man named Bahrudi—he comes from the Mahdi! Quickly! The light’s nearly up. Where do we go?”
“Almighty God … the Mahdi!”
“Please, Ahbyahd!”
“The east wall, about forty meters from the south corner, there’s
an old sewer line—”
“I know it! We’ve been working on it. It’s clear now?”
“One must crouch low and climb slowly, but yes, it’s clear. There is an opening—”
“Beneath the three large rocks on the water,” said Azra, nodding rapidly. “Have someone there. We race against the light!”
The terrorist called Blue slipped away from the chained gates and with gathering speed, slowly, subtly discarding his previous posture, quickly rounded the south edge of the wall. He stopped, pressing his back into the stone, his eyes roaming up the line of barricaded shops. Yosef stepped partially out of a boarded-up recessed doorway; he had been watching Azra and wanted the young leader to know it. The older man hissed, and in seconds “Amal Bahrudi” emerged from a narrow alleyway between the buildings; staying in the shadows, he raced up the pavement, joining Yosef in the doorway. Azra gestured to his left, indicating a barely paved road in front of him that paralleled the embassy wall; it was beyond the stretch of shops on the square; across the way there was only a wasteland of rubble and sand grass. In the distance, toward the fiery horizon, was the rock-laden coastline of the Oman Gulf. One after the other the fugitives raced down the road in their torn prison clothes and hard leather sandals, past the walls of the embassy into the sudden, startling glare of the bursting sun. Azra leading, they reached a small promontory above the crashing waves. With surefooted agility, the world’s new crown prince of killers started down over the huge boulders, stopping every now and then to gesture behind him, pointing out the areas of green sea moss where a man could lose his life by slipping and plunging down into the jagged rocks below. In less than a minute they reached an oddly shaped indentation at the bottom of the short cliff where the huge stones met the water. It was marked by three boulders forming a strange triangle at the base of which was a cavelike opening no more than three feet wide and continuously assaulted by the pounding surf.