“Evan Shaikh,” Ahmat’s voice over the line was low, firm. “I’m convinced now. Your Mahdi exists. His people exist. Go after them. Go after him.”
5
“Hasib!” The warning came from behind telling him to watch out! He spun around only to be pressed into the wall of a building in the crowded narrow street by one of the two policemen following him. His face against the stone, the ghotra protecting his flesh, he turned his head to see two bearded, disheveled youths in paramilitary fatigues striding through the bazaarlike thoroughfare, waving heavy, ugly black repeating weapons in their hands, kicking out at merchants’ stalls and rubbing their heavy boots on the surfaces of the squatting curb-sellers’ woven rugs.
“Look, sir!” whispered the policeman in English, his voice harsh, angry, yet somehow elated. “They do not see us!”
“I don’t understand.” The arrogant young terrorists approached.
“Stay against the wall!” commanded the Arab, now hammering Kendrick back into the shadows, shielding the American’s body with his own.
“Why—” The armed hoodlums passed, thrusting the barrels of their guns menacingly into the robed figures in front of them.
“Be still, sir! They are drunk either with the forbidden spirits or on the blood they have shed. But thanks be to Allah, they are outside the embassy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those of us in uniform are not permitted within sight of the embassy, but if they come outside, it is another matter. Our hands are untied.”
“What happens?” Up ahead, one of the terrorists smashed the butt of his weapon into the head of an offending Omani; his companion swung his rifle around at the crowd, warning it.
“Either they face the wrath of the Allah they spit on,” replied the policeman, whispering, his eyes filled with rage at the scene, “or they join the other reckless, filthy pigs! Stay here, ya Shaikh, sir! Stay in this small bazaar. I will be back, I have a name to give you.”
“The other— What other filthy pigs?” Evan’s words were lost; the sultan’s police officer sprang away from the wall, joining his partner, now surging through the shadowed, turbulent sea of abas. Kendrick pulled the ghotra around his face and ran after them.
What followed was as baffling and as swift to the untrained eye as a surgeon’s scalpel plunging into a hemorrhaging organ. The second policeman glanced back at his companion. They nodded to each other; both sprang forward, closing in on the two swaggering terrorists. There was an intersecting alleyway up ahead on the right, and as if an unheard signal had pierced the narrow bazaar, the crowds of sellers and buyers dispersed in various directions. Almost instantly the alleyway was empty, a dark, deserted tunnel.
The policemen’s two knives were suddenly plunged into the upper right arms of the two arrogant killers. Screams, covered by the intense, growing babble of the moving crowds, followed the involuntary release of weapons as blood spewed out of torn flesh and arrogance turned into infuriated weakness, death perhaps preferable to disgrace, eyes bulging in disbelief.
The terrorists were rushed into the dark alley by Ahmat’s two trusted police; unseen hands threw the huge lethal weapons after them. Kendrick parted the bodies in front of him and raced into the deserted tunnel. Twenty feet inside, the youthful, wild-eyed killers were supine on the stone pavement, the policemen’s knives above their throats.
“La!” shouted Evan’s protector, telling him No! “Turn away!” he continued in English, for fear Kendrick might misunderstand. “Hide your face and say nothing!”
“I must ask you!” cried Kendrick, turning, but disobeying the second command. “They probably don’t speak English, anyway—”
“They probably do, ya Shaikh, sir,” broke in the other policeman. “Whatever you have to say, say later! As spokesman, my instructions are to be obeyed without question. Is that understood, sir?”
“Understood.” Evan nodded quickly and walked back toward the arched entrance to the bazaar.
“I will come back, ya Shaikh,” said Kendrick’s protector, hovering over his prisoner. “We will take these pigs out the other end and I will be back for you—”
The man’s words were interrupted by a violent, shattering scream of defiance. Without thinking, Evan whipped his head around, suddenly wishing he hadn’t, wondering instantly if the image would ever leave him. The terrorist on the left had grabbed the policeman’s long-bladed knife above and yanked it down, slicing it into his own throat. The sight turned Kendrick’s stomach; he thought he would vomit.
“Fool!” roared the second policeman, not so much in rage as in anguish. “Child! Pig! Why do you do this to yourself? Why to me?” The protest was in vain; the terrorist was dead, blood covering his bearded young face. Somehow, thought Evan, he had witnessed a microcosm of the violence, the pain, and the futility that was the world of the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
“All is changed,” said the first officer, his knife held up, rising above his open-mouthed, incredulous prisoner, and touching his comrade’s shoulder. The latter shook his head as if trying to rid his eyes and his mind of the youthful, bloody corpse beneath him, then nodded rapidly, telling his companion he understood. The first officer approached Kendrick. “There will be a delay now. This incident must not reach the other streets, so we must move quickly. The man you seek, the man who is waiting for you is known as El-Baz. You will find him in the market beyond the old south fortress in the harbor. There is a bakery selling orange baklava. Ask inside.”
“The south fortress … in the harbor?”
“There are two stone fortresses built by the Portuguese many centuries ago. The Mirani and the Jalili—”
“I remember, of course,” interrupted Evan, rambling, finding part of his sanity, his eyes avoiding the death wound of the mutilated body on the floor of the dark alleyway. “Two forts built to protect the harbor from raiding pirates. They’re ruins now—a bakery selling orange baklava.”
“There is no time, sir. Go! Run out the other side. You cannot be seen here any longer. Quickly!”
“First answer my question,” shot back Kendrick, angering the police officer by not moving. “Or I stay here and you can answer to your sultan.”
“What question? Leave!”
“You said these two might join ‘other reckless … pigs’—those were your words. What other pigs? Where?”
“There is no time!”
“Answer me!”
The policeman inhaled deeply through his nostrils, trembling with frustration. “Very well. Incidents like tonight have happened before. We have taken a number of prisoners who are questioned by many people. Nothing must be said—”
“How many?”
“Thirty, forty, perhaps fifty by now. They disappear from the embassy and others, always others, take their places!”
“Where?”
The officer stared at Evan and shook his head. “No, ya Shaikh, sir, that I will not tell you. Go!”
“I understand. Thanks.” The congressman from Colorado gripped the cloth of his aba and raced down the alley toward the exit, turning his face away as he ran past the dead terrorist, whose streaming blood now filled the crevices between the cobblestones.
He emerged on the street, looked up at the sky and determined his direction. To the sea, to the ruins of the ancient fortress on the south shore of the harbor. He would find the man named El-Baz and arrange for the proper papers, but his mind was not on that negotiation. Instead, he was consumed by information he had heard only moments ago: thirty, forty, perhaps fifty by now. Between thirty and fifty terrorists were being held in some isolated compound in or outside the city, being interrogated with varying degrees of force by the combined intelligence units. Yet if his theory was correct, that these child butchers were the maniacal dregs of Islam, manipulated by an overlord of financial crime in Bahrain, all the interrogation techniques from the pharaohs to the Inquisition to the camps in Hoa Binh would be useless. Unless—unless—a name that conjured up a zea
lot’s most fanatical passions was delivered to one of the prisoners, persuading him to divulge what he would normally take his own life before revealing. It would mean finding a very special fanatic, of course, but it was possible. Evan had said to Frank Swann that perhaps one in twenty of the terrorists might be intelligent enough to fit this description—one out of twenty, roughly ten or twelve in the entire contingent of killers at the embassy—if he was right. Could one of them be among the thirty to fifty prisoners in that isolated, secret compound? The odds were slim, but a few hours inside, at most a night, would tell him. The time was worth spending if he could be allowed to spend it. To begin his hunt he needed a few words—a name, a place, a location on the coastline, an access code that led back to Bahrain. Something! He had to get inside that compound tonight. The executions were to be resumed three days from tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning.
First the papers from a man called El-Baz.
The ruins of the old Portuguese fortress rose eerily into the dark sky, a jagged silhouette that bespoke the strength and resolve of seagoing adventurers of centuries past. Evan walked rapidly through the area of the city known as Harat Waljat toward the market of Sabat Aynub, the name translated freely as the basket of grapes, a marketplace far more structured than a bazaar, with well-kept shops lining the square, the architecture bewildering, for it was an amalgam of early Arabic, Persian, Indian and the most modern of Western influences. All these, thought Kendrick, would fade one day, an Omani presence be restored, once again confirming the impermanence of conquerors—military, political or terrorist. It was the last that concerned him now. The Mahdi.
He entered the large square. A Roman fountain was sending sprays of water above a dark circular pool in whose center stood a statue of some Italian sculptor’s concept of a desert sheikh striding forward, robes flowing, going nowhere. But it was the crowds that stole Evan’s attention. Most were male Arabs, merchants catering to the rich and foolhardy Europeans, tourists indifferent to the chaos at the embassy, marked by their Western clothes and profusion of gold bracelets and chains, glistening symbols of defiance in a city gone mad. The Omanis, however, were like animated robots, forcing themselves to concentrate on the inconsequential, their ears blocking out the constant gunfire from the American embassy less than a half mile away. Everywhere, their eyes blinked and squinted incessantly, brows frowning in disbelief and disassociation. What was happening in their peaceful Masqat was beyond their understanding; they were no part of the madness, no part at all, so they did their best to shut it out.
He saw it. Balawa bohrtooan. “Orange baklava,” the specialty of the bakery. The Turkish-styled small brown shop with a succession of minarets painted above the glass of the storefront was sandwiched between a large, brightly lighted jewelry store and an equally fashionable boutique devoted to leather goods, the name Paris scattered in black and gold signs beyond the glass in front of ascending blocks of luggage and accessories. Kendrick walked diagonally across the square, past the fountain, and approached the door of the bakery.
“Your people were right,” said the dark-haired woman in the tailored black suit walking out of the shadows of the Harat Waljat, the miniature camera in her hand. She raised it and pressed the shutter release; the automatic advance took successive photographs as Evan Kendrick entered the bakery shop in the market of Sabat Aynub. “Was he noticed in the bazaar?” she asked, replacing the camera in her purse, addressing the short, robed middle-aged Arab who cautiously stood behind her.
“There was talk about a man running into the alley after the police,” said the informant, his eyes on the bakery. “It was contradicted, convincingly, I believe.”
“How? He was seen.”
“But in the excitement he was not seen rushing out, clasping his billfold, which was presumably taken by the pigs. That was the information emphatically exclaimed by our man to the on-lookers. Naturally, others emphatically agreed, for hysterical people will always leap on new information unknown to a crowd of strangers. It elevates them.”
“You’re very good,” said the woman, laughing softly. “So are your people.”
“We had better be, ya anisa Khalehla,” responded the Arab, using the Omani title of respect. “If we are less than that, we face alternatives we’d rather not consider.”
“Why the bakery?” asked Khaleh. “Any ideas?”
“None whatsoever. I detest baklava. The honey doesn’t drip, it pours. The Jews like it, you know.”
“So do I.”
“Then you both forget what the Turks did to you—both.”
“I don’t think our subject went into that bakery for either baklava or a historical treatise on the Turks versus the tribes of Egypt and Israel.”
“A daughter of Cleopatra speaks?” The informant smiled.
“This daughter of Cleopatra doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I’m just trying to learn things.”
“Then start with the military sedan that picked up your subject several blocks north of his hotel after the prayers of el Maghreb. It has considerable significance.”
“He must have friends in the army.”
“There is only the sultan’s garrison in Masqat.”
“So?”
“The officers are rotated bimonthly between the city and the posts at Jiddah and Marmul, as well as a dozen or so garrisons along the borders of South Yemen.”
“What’s your point?”
“I present you with two points, Khalehla. The first is that I find it unbelievably coincidental that the subject, after four years, would so conveniently know a certain friend in the relatively small rotating officer corps stationed this specific fortnight in Masqat in an officer corps that changes with the years—”
“Unusually coincidental, I agree, but certainly possible. What’s your second point?”
“Actually, it negates my mentioning the first. These days no vehicle from the Masqat garrison would pick up a foreigner in the manner he was picked up, in the guise he was picked up, without supreme authority.”
“The sultan?”
“Who else?”
“He wouldn’t dare! He’s boxed. A wrong move and he’d be held responsible for whatever executions take place. If that happens, the Americans would level Masqat to the ground. He knows that!”
“Perhaps he also knows that he is held responsible both for what he does do as well as for what he does not do. In such a situation it’s better to know what others are doing, if only to offer guidance—or to abort some unproductive activity with one more execution.”
Khalehla looked hard at the informant in the dim light of the square’s periphery. “If that military car took the subject to a meeting with the sultan, it also brought him back.”
“Yes, it did,” agreed the middle-aged man, his voice flat, as if he understood the implication.
“Which means that whatever the subject proposed was not rejected out of hand.”
“It would appear so, ya anisa Khalehla.”
“And we have to know what was proposed, don’t we?”
“It would be dangerous in the extreme for all of us not to know,” said the Arab, nodding. “We are dealing with more than the deaths of two hundred thirty-six Americans. We are dealing with the destiny of a nation. My nation, I should add, and I shall do my best to see that it remains ours. Do you understand me, my dear Khalehla?”
“I do, ya sahib el Aumer.”
“Better a dead cipher than a catastrophic shock.”
“I understand.”
“Do you really? You had far more advantages in your Mediterranean than we ever had in our obscure Gulf. It is our time now. We won’t let anyone stop us.”
“I want you to have your time, dear friend. We want you to have it.”
“Then do what you must do, ya sahbitee Khalehla.”
“I will.” The well-tailored woman reached into her purse and took out a short-barreled automatic. Holding it in her left hand, she again searched her purse and r
emoved a clip of bullets; with a pronounced click she jammed it into the base of the handle and snapped back the loading chamber. The weapon was ready to fire. “Go now, adeem sahbee,” she said, securing the strap of her purse over her shoulder, her hand inside, gripping the automatic. “We understand each other and you must be somewhere else, someplace where others can see you, not here.”
“Salaam aleikum, Khalehla. Go with Allah.”
“I’ll send him to Allah to plead his case.… Quickly. He’s coming out of the bakery! I’ll follow him and do what has to be done. You have perhaps ten to fifteen minutes to be with others away from here.”
“At the last, you protect us, don’t you? You are a treasure. Be careful, dear Khalehla.”
“Tell him to be careful. He intrudes.”
“I’ll go to the Zawadi mosque and talk with the elder mullahs and muezzins. Holy eyes are not questioned. It is a short distance, five minutes at most.”
“Aleikum salaam,” said the woman, starting across the square to her left, her gaze riveted on the American in Arab robes who had passed beyond the fountain and was walking rapidly toward the dark, narrow streets to the east, beyond the market of Sabat Aynub. What is that damn fool doing? she thought as she removed her hat, crushing it with her left hand and shoving it into her purse next to the weapon that she gripped feverishly in her right. He’s heading into the el Shari el Mishkwiyis, she concluded, mixing her thoughts in Arabic and English, referring to what is called in the West the roughest section of town, an area outsiders avoid. They were right. He’s an amateur and I can’t go in there dressed like this! But I have to. My God, he’ll get us both killed!
Evan Kendrick hurried down the uneven layers of stone that was the narrow street, past low, run-down, congested buildings and half-buildings—crumbling structures with canvas and animal skins covering blown-out windows; those that remained intact were protected by slatted shutters, more broken than not. Bare wires sagged everywhere, municipal junction boxes having been spliced, electricity stolen, dangerous. The pungent smells of Arabic cooking intermingled with stronger odors, unmistakable odors—hashish, burning coca leaves smuggled into unpatrolled coves in the Gulf, and pockets of human waste. The inhabitants of this stretch of ghetto moved slowly, cautiously, suspiciously through the dimly lit caverns of their world, at home with its degradation, comfortable with its insulated dangers, at ease with their collective status as outcasts—the ease confirmed by sudden bursts of laughter behind shuttered windows. The dress code of this el Shari el Mishkwiyis was anything but consistent. Abas and ghotras coexisted with torn blue jeans, forbidden miniskirts, and the uniforms of sailors and soldiers from a dozen different nations—soiled uniforms exclusively from the ranks of enlisted personnel, although it was said that many an officer borrowed a subordinate’s clothes to venture inside and taste the prohibited pleasures of the neighborhood.