‘Somehow you always get to the heart of things… How is everyone in Jerusalem?’
‘Speaking of sending regards, Ben-Ami sends you his.’
‘Benny?’ cried Rashad, sitting forward. ‘Good Lord, I haven’t thought of him in years! Does he still wear those silly designer blue jeans and strap his weapon back over his tail?’
‘He probably always will and charge the Mossad double for both.’
‘He’s a good guy and one of the best control agents Israel’s ever had. We worked together in Damascus; he’s small and a little cynical, but a good man to have on your side. Tough as nails, actually.’
‘As your bum would say, “Tell me about it.” We were closing in on the hotel in Bahrain and all he did was give me lectures over the radio.’
‘He’ll join us in Masqat?’
‘He’ll join you, you not very nice person who has shut me out.’
‘Come on, Manny—’
‘I know, I know. I’m a burden.’
‘What do you think?’
‘All right, I’m a burden, but even burdens are kept informed.’
‘At least twice a day. Where’s Ben-Ami going to meet us? And how? I can’t imagine that the Mossad wants any part of this.’
‘After the Iranian mess the moon’s too close, especially with CIA input and banks in Switzerland. Ben will leave a telephone number at the palace switchboard for a Miss Adrienne—my idea… Also, someone’s coming with him.’
‘Who?’
‘A lunatic.’
‘That helps. Does he have a name?’
‘Only one I knew was code Blue.’
‘Azra!’
‘No, that was the other one.’
‘I know, but the Israeli killed Azra, the Arabic Blue. Evan told me it sickened him, two kids with such hatred.’
‘With the kids it’s all sickening. Instead of baseball bats, they carry repeating rifles and grenades… Has Payton straightened out your transportation?’
‘He worked it out with us yesterday. Air Force cargo to Frankfurt and on to Cairo, where we go under cover in small craft to Kuwait and Dubai, with the last leg by helicopter. We’ll reach Oman at night, landing in the Jabal Sham, where one of Ahmat’s unmarked cars will meet us and drive us to the palace.’
“That’s really underground,’ said Weingrass, nodding, impressed.
‘It has to be. Evan’s got to disappear while stories are planted that he was seen in Hawaii and is supposedly holed up at an estate on Maui. Graphics is working up some photos showing him over there and they’ll hit the newspapers.’
‘Mitchell’s imagination is improving.’
‘There’s none better, Manny.’
‘Maybe he should run the Agency.’
‘No, he hates administrative work and he’s a terrible politician. If he doesn’t like someone or something, everybody knows it. He’s better off where he is.’
The sound of the front door opening and closing had an immediate effect on Weingrass. ‘Oy!’ he cried, shoving his cigarette into the startled Khalehla’s mouth and blowing away the smoke above him, waving his hands to move the incriminating evidence towards Rashad. ‘Naughty sheiks!’ he whispered. ‘Smoking in my presence!’
‘Impossible,’ said Khalehla softly, removing the cigarette and crushing it in an ashtray as Kendrick walked through the living room and on to the porch.
‘She’d never smoke that close to you,’ admonished Evan, dressed in a blue sweat suit, perspiration rolling down his face.
‘Now you’ve got the ears of a Dobermann?’
‘And you’ve got the brains of a hooked snapper.’
‘Very smart fish.’
‘Sorry,’ said Rashad calmly. ‘He can be terribly demanding.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘What did I just say?’ shouted Weingrass. ‘He says that all the time. It’s the sign of a highly developed, misplaced superiority complex and very irritating to really superior intellects… Have a good workout, dummy?’
Kendrick smiled and walked to the bar where there was a jug of orange juice. ‘I’m up to thirty minutes, fast pace,’ he answered, pouring himself a glass of juice.
‘That’s very nice if you’re a cowboy’s horse on a roundup.’
‘He says things like that all the time,’ protested Kendrick. ‘It’s aggravating.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Khalehla replied, drinking her coffee.
‘Any calls?’ asked Evan.
‘It’s barely past seven, darling.’
‘Not in Zurich. It’s past one in the afternoon over there. I was talking to them before I went out.’
‘Talking to whom?’ asked Rashad.
‘Mainly to the director of the Gemeinschaft Bank. Mitch scared his bladder dry with the information we have and he’s trying to co-operate… Wait a minute. Did anyone check the telex in the study?’
‘No, but I heard the damn thing clacking away about twenty minutes ago,’ said Weingrass.
Kendrick put down his glass, turned and walked rapidly out of the porch and across the living room to a door beyond the stone hallway. Khalehla and Manny watched him, then looked at each other and shrugged. Within moments the congressman returned, gripping a telex sheet in his hand, his expression conveying his excitement. ‘They did it!’ he exclaimed.
‘Who did what?’ asked Weingrass.
‘The bank. You remember the fifty million line of credit Grinell and his consortium of thieves in California set up for my buy-out?’
‘My God,’ exclaimed Khalehla. ‘They couldn’t have left it standing!’
‘Of course not. It was cancelled the moment Grinell got off the island.’
‘So?’ said Manny.
‘In this age of complicated telecommunications, computer errors crop up now and then and a beaut was just made. There’s no record of the cancellation having been received. The credit’s on! only it’s been transferred to a sister bank in Bern with a new, coded account number. It’s all there.’
‘They’ll never pay!’ Weingrass was emphatic.
‘It’ll be charged against their reserves, which are ten times fifty million.’
“They’ll fight it, Evan,’ insisted Khalehla, as emphatic as the old man.
‘And parade themselves in the Swiss courts? Somehow I doubt it.’
The Cobra helicopter without markings stuttered across the desert at an altitude of less than five hundred feet. Evan and Khalehla, exhausted from nearly twenty-six hours in the air and racing to covert connections on the ground, sat next to each other, Rashad’s head on Kendrick’s shoulder, his own slumped down into his chest; both were asleep. A man in belted khaki overalls with no insignia walked out of the flight deck and down the fuselage. He shook Evan’s arm in the dim light.
‘We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, sir.’
‘Oh?’ Kendrick snapped up his head, blinking his eyes and opening them wide to rid them of sleep. ‘Thanks. I’ll wake my friend here; they always do things before arriving anywhere, don’t they?’
‘Not this “they”,’ said Khalehla out loud without moving. ‘I sleep to the very last minute.’
‘Well, forgive me, but I don’t. I can’t. Necessity calls.’
‘Men,’ remarked the agent from Cairo, removing her head from his shoulder and shifting to the other side of the seat and into the bulkhead. ‘No control,’ she added, her eyes still closed.
‘We’ll keep you posted,’ said the Air Force flight officer, laughing quietly, and returning to the deck.
Sixteen minutes passed and the pilot spoke over the intercom. ‘Flare spotted directly ahead. Buckle up for touchdown, please.’ The helicopter decelerated and hovered over the ground, where the headlights of two cars facing each other had replaced the flare. Slowly, the chopper was lowered into its threshold. ‘Depart the aircraft as quickly as possible, please,’ continued the pilot. ‘We have to get out of here fast, if you catch my drift.’
No sooner had they stepped down the metal ladder to the ground than the Cobra, its rotors thundering, rose in the night sky; it turned, stuttering in the desert moonlight, kicking up what sand there was, and headed north, accelerating rapidly, the noise receding in the darkness above. Walking into the beams of a car’s headlights was the young sultan of Oman. He was in slacks, an open-necked white shirt replacing the New England Patriots football jersey he had worn that first night he met with Evan in the desert sixteen months ago.
‘Let me talk first, okay?’ he said, as Kendrick and Rashad approached.
‘Okay,’ replied Kendrick.
‘First reactions can be not too smart, agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ agreed Evan.
‘But I’m supposed to be smart, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Still, consistency is the product of small minds, isn’t that so?’
‘Within reasonable boundaries.’
‘Don’t qualify.’
‘Don’t you play lawyer. The only bar you ever passed was with Manny in Los Angeles.’
‘Why, that hypocritical Israeli nut—’
‘At least you didn’t say Jew.’
‘I wouldn’t. I don’t like the sound of it any more than I like the sound of “dirty Arab”… Anyway, Manny and I didn’t pass too many bars in LA that we didn’t go into.’
‘What’s your point, Ahmat?’
The young ruler breathed deeply and spoke quickly. ‘I know the whole story now and I feel like a damned idiot.’
‘The whole story?’
‘Everything. That Inver Brass crowd, Bollinger’s munitions bandits, that bastard Hamendi who my royal Saudi brothers in Riyadh should have executed the moment they caught him… the whole ball of wax. And I should have known you wouldn’t do what I thought you did. “Commando Kendrick” versus the rotten Arab isn’t you, it never was you… I’m sorry, Evan.’ Ahmat walked forward and embraced the congressman from Colorado’s ninth district.