‘If I’m wrong, the only other reason for killing him was his meeting with you.’
‘Oh, Christ—’
‘Leave the hotel right away and don’t leave any identification behind. It could be dangerous to you. You’ll see two policemen; they’ll follow you, protect you, and somewhere in the street one of them will give you the name of the man who will provide you with papers.’
I’m on my way,’ said Kendrick, getting to his feet, focusing his mind on removing such items as his passport, money belt, airline tickets and whatever articles of clothing might be traced to an American on a plane from Riyadh.
‘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.’
* * *
Chapter 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, dishevelled 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 streetsellers’ 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.
They face either 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, frightened 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 haemorrhaging organ. The second policeman glanced back at his companion. They nodded to each other; both sprang forward closing in on the two swaggering terrorists. Ahead, on the right, was an intersecting alleyway, 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 towards 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 harbour. There is a bakery selling orange baklava. Ask inside.’
‘The south fortress… in the harbour?’
‘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 harbour 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 towards 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 harbour. 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 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 zealot’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.