Weingrass smashed his foot against the boy’s elbow and as the empty hand whipped out from under the cloth he stepped on it, pinning it to the young Arab’s chest. ‘No more of that, you fool of a child!’ said Manny, his Arabic that of a Saudi officer reprimanding a lowly recruit. ‘We haven’t covered you to have you cause even more trouble. Of course you were shot, and I trust you realize that you were merely wounded, not killed, which could have been easily managed!’
‘What are you saying?’
‘What were you doing?’ shouted Manny in reply. ‘Running in the road, raising your voice, crawling around our objective like a thief in the night! Yosef was right, you should be shipped back to the Baaka.’
‘Yosef?… Where is Yosef?’
‘Up in the house with the others. Come, I’ll help you join them.’ Afraid of falling over, Weingrass held on to the branch of a sapling as the terrorist pulled himself up, gripping Manny’s hand. ‘First, give me your weapon!’
‘What?’
‘They think you’re stupid enough. They don’t want you armed.’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘You don’t have to.’ Weingrass slapped the bewildered young fanatic across the face and simultaneously shoved his right hand between the buttoned fold of the boy’s jacket to pull out the would-be killer’s gun. It was appropriate; it was a .22 calibre pistol. ‘You can shoot gnats with this,’ said Manny, grabbing the teenager’s arm. ‘Come along. Hop on one foot, if it’s easier. We’ll paste you up.’
What remained of the late afternoon sun was obscured by the swirling dark clouds of a gathering storm surging out of the mountains. The drained, exhausted old man and the wounded youngster were halfway across the road when suddenly the roar of an engine was heard and headlights of a racing vehicle caught them in the beams. The car was bearing down on them, thundering up from the south from Mesa Verde. Tyres shrieking, the powerful car side-slipped into a skid and pounded to a stop only yards away from Weingrass and his captive who were lunging towards the hedge, Manny’s grip tightening on the Arab’s field jacket. A man leaped from the large black car as Weingrass—lurching, stumbling—reached into his overcoat pocket for his own .38 automatic. The figure rushing towards him was a blur in the old architect’s eyes; he raised his gun to fire.
‘Manny!’ yelled Gee-Gee Gonzalez.
Weingrass fell to the ground, his hand still gripping the wounded terrorist. ‘Grab him!’ he ordered Gee-Gee with what seemed like the last breath in his lungs. ‘Don’t let him go—hold his arms. They sometimes carry cyanide!’
The young Arab was given a needle by one of the two nurses; he would be unconscious until morning. His bullet wound was bloody, not serious, the bullet itself having passed through the flesh; it was cleansed, the openings held together with heavy tape and the bleeding stopped. He was then carried by Gonzalez to a guest room, his arms and legs strapped to the four corners of the bed, where the nurses covered his naked body with two blankets to help prevent any possible trauma.
‘He’s so terribly young,’ said the nurse placing the pillow under the teenage Arab’s head.
‘He’s a killer,’ responded Weingrass icily, staring at the terrorist’s face. ‘He’d kill you without thinking for an instant about the life he was taking—the way he wants to kill Jews. The way he will kill us if we let him live.’
‘That’s revolting, Mr. Weingrass,’ said the other nurse. ‘He’s a child.’
‘Tell that to the parents of God knows how many Jewish children who were never permitted his years.’ Manny left the room to rejoin Gonzalez, who had hastily gone outside to drive his all too recognizable car into a garage; he had returned and was pouring himself a large glass of whisky at the bar on the veranda.
‘Help yourself,’ said the architect, walking into the enclosed porch and heading for his leather armchair. ‘I’ll put it on your bill like you do with me.’
‘You crazy old man!’ spat out Gee-Gee. ‘Loco! You plain loco, you know that? You could’a been killed! Muerto! You comprende? Muerto, muerto— dead, dead, dead, you old fool! Maybe that I could live with, but not when you give me a heart attack! I don’t live so good with a heart attack when it’s fatal, you comprende, you know what I mean?’
‘Okay, okay. So you can have that drink on the house—’
‘Loco!’ shouted Gonzalez again, drinking the whisky in what appeared to be a single swallow.
‘You’ve made your point,’ agreed Manny. ‘Have another. I won’t start charging until the third.’
‘I don’t know whether to go or whether to stay!’ said Gee-Gee, once more pouring a drink.
‘The police?’
‘Like I told you, who had time for the police? And if I called them, they’d come around in a month!… Your girl, the ama de cria— the nurse, she’s calling them. I only hope she found one of those payasos. Sometimes you gotta call Durango to get someone out here.’
The phone on the bar rang—it rang, but it was not the ring of a telephone; instead it was a steady whirr-toned sound. Weingrass was so startled that he nearly fell to the floor pushing himself out of the chair.
‘You want me to get it?’ asked Gonzalez.
‘No!’ roared Manny, walking rapidly, unsteadily, towards the bar.
‘Don’t bite off my cabeza.’
‘Hello?’ said the old man into the phone, forcing control on himself.
‘Mr. Weingrass?’
‘Perhaps yes, perhaps no. Who are you?’
‘We’re on a laser patch into your telephone line. My name is Mitchell Payton—’
‘I know all about you,’ interrupted Manny. ‘Is my boy all right?’
‘Yes, he is. I’ve just spoken to him in the Bahamas. A military aircraft has been dispatched from Holmstead Air Force Base to pick him up. He’ll be in Washington in a few hours.’
‘Keep him there! Surround him with guards! Don’t let anyone near him!’
‘Then it’s happened out there?… I feel so useless, so incompetent. I should have posted guards… How many were killed?’
‘Three,’ said Manny.
‘Oh, my God… How much do the police know?’
‘They don’t. They haven’t got here yet.’
‘They haven’t… Listen to me, Mr. Weingrass. What I’m about to say will appear strange if not insane to you, but I know what I’m talking about. For the time being this tragic event must be contained. We’ll have a far greater chance to catch the bastards by avoiding panic and letting our own experts go to work. Can you understand that, Mr. Weingrass?’
‘Understood and arranged,’ answered an old man who had worked with the Mossad, a certain impatient condescension creeping into his voice. ‘The police will be met outside and told it was a false alarm—a neighbour whose car had broken down and couldn’t reach us on the phone, that’s all.’
‘I forgot,’ said the director of Special Projects quietly. ‘You’ve been here before.’
‘I’ve been here,’ agreed Manny, without comment.
‘Wait a minute!’ exclaimed Payton. ‘You said three were dead, but you’re talking to me, you’re all right.’
‘The three were them, not us, Mr. CIA Incompetent.’
‘What? . . .Jesus Christ
‘He wasn’t much help. Try Abraham.’
‘Please be clearer, Mr. Weingrass.’
‘I had to kill them. But the fourth’s alive and under sedation. Get your experts out here before I kill him, too.’
* * *
Chapter 29
The CIA station chief in the Bahamas, a short, deeply tanned man with broad features, manoeuvred quickly from his office at the embassy on Queen Street. An armed escort was sent by the Nassau police to the Cable Beach Hotel, on the shores of Bay Road, where four uniformed officers rapidly accompanied a tall man with light brown hair and a striking olive-skinned woman from their suite on the seventh floor to a waiting vehicle in the efficiently emptied drive outside the imposing marble lobby. The hotel’s director of operations, an alert Scotsman named McLeod, had mapped out a route through the service corridors, where his most trusted security guards stood watch, to the brightly lit entrance fronted by two enormous fountains sending floodlit sprays up into the dark sky. McLeod’s two assistants, an immense good-humoured man with a booming laugh and the improbable name of Vernal, accompanied by an attractive young hostess, courteously explained to those arriving and departing that the delays would be brief. They persuasively explained while the five-man motorcycle unit swept the dramatically shadowed grounds. The station chief had personalized everything; favours were done for him. He knew by name everyone there was to know in the Bahamas. And they knew him. In silence. Evan and Khalehla, shielded by the wall of police, climbed into the government vehicle, the CIA man in the front seat. Kendrick was beyond talking; Khalehla could only grip his hand, knowing only too well what he was experiencing. Clarity of thought eluded him; burning sorrow and a furious anger had replaced it. Tears had welled in his eyes over the deaths of Kashi and Sabri Hassan; he did not have to be told of the mutilations, he could easily, horribly imagine what they were. Yet those tears had been quickly, impulsively wiped away by a clenched fist. A reckoning was coming, that, too, was in his eyes, in the cores of his pupils. Fury.