‘I had to be convincing, tell them that—no, don’t. Not yet. Get them out. Tell them anything you like but we’ve got to talk. Then you have to reach Ahmat for me… How long have I been here?’
‘Nearly an hour—’
‘Christ! What time is it?’
‘Four-fifteen in the morning.’
‘Hurry! For God’s sake, hurry!’
Faisal dismissed the soldiers with calming words, reassuring them, explaining that there were things he could not explain. As the last guard went out of the door, he paused, removed his automatic from its holster and handed it to the doctor. ‘Should I aim this at you while we talk?’ asked the Omani after the soldier had left.
‘Before sunrise,’ said Kendrick, pushing away the ice packs and sitting up, painfully swinging his legs over the table. ‘I want a number of guns aimed at me. But not as accurately as they might be.’
‘What are you saying? You can’t be serious.’
‘Escape. Ahmat has to arrange an escape.’
‘What? You are crazy!’
‘Never saner, Doctor, and never more serious. Pick two or three of your best men, which means men you completely trust, and set up some kind of transfer—’
‘Transfer?’
Evan shook his head and blinked his eyes, the swelling still apparent although reduced by the cold compresses. He tried to find the words he needed for the astonished doctor. ‘Let me put it this way. Somebody’s decided to move a few prisoners from here to somewhere else.’
‘Who would do that? Why?’
‘Nobody! You make it up and do it, don’t explain. Do you have photographs of the men inside?’
‘Of course. It’s normal arrest procedure, although the names are meaningless. When they’re given, they’re always false.’
‘Let me have them, all of them. I’ll tell you whom to choose.’
‘Choose for what?’
‘The transfer. The ones you’re moving out of here to some place else.’
‘To where? Really, you’re not making sense.’
‘You’re not listening. Somewhere along the way, a back street or a dark road outside the city, we’ll overpower the guards and escape.’
‘Overpower…? We?’
‘I’m part of the group, part of the escape. I’m going back in there.’
‘Complete madness!’ exclaimed Faisal.
‘Complete sanity,’ countered Evan. ‘There’s a man inside who can take me where I want to go. Take us where we have to go! Get me the police photographs and then reach Ahmat on the triple-five number. Tell him what I’ve told you, he’ll understand… Understand, hell! It’s what that Ivy League juvenile delinquent had in mind from the beginning!’
‘I think perhaps you did also, ya Shaikh ya Amreekdnee.’
‘Maybe I did. Maybe I just want to blame it on someone else. I don’t fit into this mould.’
‘Then something inside is propelling you, re-shaping the man who was. It happens.’
Kendrick looked into the soft brown eyes of the Omani doctor. ‘It happens,’ agreed Evan. Suddenly his mind was filled with the outlines of a murky silhouette; the figure of a man emerged from the raging fires of an earth-bound hell. Whirlwinds of smoke enveloped the apparition as cascading rubble fell all around it, muting the screams of victims. The Mahdi. Killer of women and children, of friends dear to him, partners in a vision—his family, the only family he ever wanted. All gone, all dead, the vision joining the smoke of destruction, disappearing in the rising vapours until nothing was left but the cold and the darkness. The Mahdi! ‘It happens,’ repeated Kendrick softly, rubbing his forehead. ‘Get me the photographs and call Ahmat. I want to be back in that compound in twenty minutes, and I want to be taken out ten minutes later. For God’s sake, move!’
Ahmat, sultan of Oman, still in slacks and his New England Patriots T-shirt, sat in the high-backed chair, the red light of his private, secure telephone glowing below on the right leg of his desk. With the instrument next to his ear he was listening intensely.
‘So it happened, Faisal,’ he spoke quietly. ‘Praise be to Allah, it happened.’
‘He told me you expected it,’ said the doctor over the line, his tone questioning.
‘”Expected” is too strong, old friend. Hoped is more appropriate.’
‘I removed your tonsils, great sultan, and I attended you over the years for minor illnesses including a great fear you had that proved groundless.’
Ahmat laughed, more to himself than into the phone. ‘A wild week in Los Angeles, Amal. Who knew what I might have contracted?’
‘We had a pact. I never told your father.’
‘Which means you think I’m not telling you something now.’
‘The thought occurred to me.’
‘Very well, old friend—’ Suddenly, the young sultan snapped his head up as the door of his royal office was opened. Two women entered; the first was obviously pregnant, an Occidental from New Bedford, Massachusetts, blonde and wearing a bathrobe. His wife. Next to appear was an olive-skinned, dark-haired female dressed fashionably in street clothes. She was known to the household simply as Khalehla. ‘Apart from common sense, good Doctor,’ continued Ahmat into the phone, ‘I have certain sources. Our mutual acquaintance needed assistance, and who better to provide it than the ruler of Oman? We leaked information to the animals at the embassy. Prisoners were being held somewhere, subjected to brutal interrogation. Someone had to be sent there to maintain discipline, order—and Kendrick found him… Give our American anything he wants, but delay his schedule by fifteen or twenty minutes, until my two police officers arrive.’
‘The Al Kabir? Your cousins?’
‘Two special police will suffice, my friend.’
There was a brief silence, a voice searching for words. ‘The rumours are true, aren’t they, Ahmat?’
‘I have no idea what you mean. Rumours are gossip and neither interests me.’
‘They say you are so much wiser than your years—’
‘That’s sophomoric,’ broke in the sultan.
‘He said you had to be to—”run this place”, he said. It’s difficult for one who treated you for mumps.’
‘Don’t dwell on it, Doctor. Just keep me informed.’ Ahmat reached into the drawer where the base of the private telephone lay and punched a series of numbers. Within seconds, he spoke. ‘I’m sorry, my family, I know you’re asleep, but I must again bother you. Go to the compound at once. Amal Bahrudi wants to escape. With fish.’ He hung up.
‘What’s happened?’ asked the young sultan’s wife as she rapidly walked forward.
‘Please,’ said Ahmat, his eyes on the stomach of his waddling spouse. ‘You have only six weeks to go, Bobbie. Move slowly.’
‘He’s too much,’ said Roberta Aldridge Yamenni, turning her head and addressing Khalehla at her side. This jock of mine came in around two thousand in the Boston marathon and he’s telling me how to carry a baby. Is that too much?’
‘The royal seed, Bobbie,’ replied Khalehla, smiling.
‘Royal, my foot! Diapers are one hell of an equalizer. Ask my mother, she had four of us in six years. Really, darling, what happened?’
‘Our American congressman made contact in the compound. We’re mocking up an escape.’
‘It worked!’ cried Khalehla, approaching the desk.
‘It was your idea,’ said Ahmat.
‘Please, forget it. I’m way out of line here.’
‘Nothing’s out of line,’ the youthful sultan said firmly. ‘Appearances notwithstanding, risks notwithstanding, we need all the help we can get, all the advice we can gather… I apologize, Khalehla. I haven’t even said hello. As with my cousins, my lowly policemen, I’m sorry to drag you out at this hour, but I knew you’d want to be here.’
‘Nowhere else.’
‘How did you manage it? I mean leaving the hotel at four in the morning.’
‘Thank Bobbie. I add, however, Ahmat, that neither of our reputations has been enhanced.’
‘Oh?’ The sultan looked at his wife.
‘Great Lord,’ intoned Bobbie, her palms together, bowing and speaking in her Boston accent. ‘This lovely lady is a courtesan from Cairo—nice ring to it, huh? Under the circumstances—’ Here the royal wife outlined her swollen stomach with her hands and continued, ‘The privilege of rank has its goodies. Speaking as one of Radcliffe’s history graduates, which my former roommate here will attest, Henry the Eighth called it “riding in the saddle”. It happened when Anne Boleyn was too indisposed to accommodate her monarch.’
‘For God’s sake, Roberta, this isn’t The King and I and I’m not Yul Brynner.’
‘You are now, pal!’ Laughing, Ahmat’s wife looked at Khalehla. ‘Of course, if you touch him, I’ll scratch your eyes out.’
‘Not to fear, my dear,’ said Khalehla in mock seriousness. ‘Not after what you’ve told me.’
‘All right, you two,’ Ahmat interrupted. His brief look expressed the gratitude he felt towards both women.
‘We have to laugh now and then,’ said his wife. ‘Otherwise I think we’d go stark raving mad.’
‘Raving as in mad,’ agreed Ahmat quietly, settling his eyes on the woman from Cairo. ‘How’s your British businessman friend?’
‘Raving as in drunk,’ answered Khalehla. ‘He was last seen half upright in the hotel’s American Bar still calling me names.’