She reached the area before the passengers from the Oman jet. The traffic on the Arrivals level was horrendous: cars with tinted windows; taxis; ordinary, nondescript vehicles; pickup trucks of all descriptions. The noise and the fumes were overpowering, the cacophony deafening under the low concrete ceiling. Khalehla found a shadowed enclave between two cargo bins and waited.
The first to emerge was the terrorist called Azra, accompanied by a uniformed official. The latter flagged a taxi, which sped up to the coarsely-dressed young man at the curb. He stepped inside and read from a piece of paper in his hand, giving the driver instructions.
Several minutes later the strange American and the unbelievable Anthony MacDonald walked out on the pavement.
Something was wrong! thought Khalehla instantly, without really thinking, merely observing. Tony was behaving like his once and former Cairo self! There was agitation in every movement of his huge body, wasted energy craving attention, his eyes bulging, his constantly changing facial expressions those of a drunk pleading for respect—all in counterpoint to the superb control necessary to a deep cover operator with a network of informers in a world-class volatile situation. It was all wrong!
And then it happened! As the taxi sped up to the curb, MacDonald suddenly rammed his enormous torso against the American, sending him out into the covered street in front of the rushing cab. Kendrick bounced off the bonnet, his body flung in mid-air into the racing traffic of the tunnel-like concourse. Brakes screeched, whistles blew, and the congressman from the ninth district of Colorado was impaled, curved around the shattered windscreen of a small Japanese car. Good God, he’s dead! thought Khalehla, running out on the pavement. And then he moved—both arms moved as the American tried to push himself up, collapsing as he did so.
Khalehla raced to the car, surging through a knot of police and Bahrain’s secret police who had converged on the scene, rupturing one immovable man’s spleen with a vicious, accurate fist. She threw her body over the spastically moving Kendrick while removing the gun from her flight jacket. She spoke to the nearest uniformed man, the weapon angled at his head.
‘My name is Khalehla and that’s all you have to know. This man is my property and he goes with me. Pass the word and get us out of here or I’ll kill you.’
The figure raced into the sterile room so agitated that he slammed the door behind him, nearly tripping in the darkness on his way to his equipment. Hands trembling, he brought his appliance to life.
Ultra Maximum Secure
No Existing Intercepts
Proceed
Something’s happened! Breakthrough or breakdown, the hunter or the hunted. The last report speaks of Bahrain but without specifics, only that the subject was in a state of extreme anxiety demanding to be flown there immediately. Of course that assumes he either escaped from the embassy, was taken out by subterfuge or never went inside at all. But why Bahrain? Everything is too incomplete, as if the subject’s shadow was obscuring events for his own reasons—a not unlikely possibility considering everything that’s happened during the past few years and the subpoena powers of Congress and various special prosecutors.
What has happened? What’s happening now? My appliances scream for information but I can’t give them anything! To factor in a name without specific reference only spews forth encyclopaedic historical data long since inserted—and updated—by photoscan. Sometimes I think my own talents defeat me, for I see beyond factors and equations and find visions.
Yet he is the man! My appliances tell me that and I trust them.
* * *
Chapter 13
Evan struggled against the constricting tape around his left shoulder and then was aware of a stinging sensation that extended throughout his upper chest accompanied by the sharp smell of rubbing alcohol. He opened his eyes, startled to find that he was sitting up in a bed, pillows supporting his back. He was in a woman’s bedroom. A dressing table with a low, gold-rimmed chair against the wall stood on his left. A profusion of lotions and perfumes were in small ornate bottles in front of a large three-sided mirror bordered with tiny bulbs. Tall windows flanked the table, the cascading peach-coloured curtains made of a translucent material that virtually shouted—as did the rest of the rococo furniture—a hefty decorator’s fee. A satin chaise-lounge was in front of the far window, beside it a small telephone table-cum-magazine rack with a top of rose marble. The wall directly in front of the bed, some twenty feet away, consisted of a long row of mirrored cupboards. On his right, beyond the bedside table, was an ivory-coloured writing desk with another gold-rimmed chair—and then the longest single bureau he had ever seen; it was lacquered peach—peche, as Manny Weingrass would insist upon—and extended the entire length of the wall. The floor was covered with soft thick white carpeting, the pile of which appeared capable of massaging the bare feet of anyone walking across it if he dared. The only item lacking was a mirror over the bed.
The sculptured door was closed, yet he could hear voices beyond it, a man’s and a woman’s. He turned his wrist to look at his watch; it was gone. Where was he? How did he get here? Oh, Christ! The airport concourse… He was slammed into a car—two rushing cars—and a crowd had gathered around him until, limping, he was led away. Azra! Azra was waiting for him at the Aradous Hotel!… And MacDonald! Gone! Oh, my God, everything’s blown apart! Close to panic, only vaguely aware of the late afternoon sun streaming through the windows, he threw off the sheet and climbed out of bed, unsteady, wincing, gritting his teeth with each move he made, but he could move and that was all that mattered. He was also naked and suddenly the door opened.
‘I’m glad you could get up,’ said the olive-skinned woman as Kendrick lurched back to the bed and the peche sheet while she closed the door. ‘It confirms the doctor’s diagnosis; he just left. He said you were badly banged up but the X rays showed no broken bones.’
‘X rays? Where are we and who the hell are you, lady?’
‘You don’t remember me, then?’
‘If this,’ exclaimed Evan angrily, sweeping his hand over the room, ‘is your modest pied-d-terre in Bahrain, I assure you I’ve never seen it before. It’s not a place one easily forgets.’
‘It’s not mine,’ said Khalehla, shaking her head with a trace of a smile and walking to the foot of the bed. ‘It belongs to a member of the royal family, a cousin of the Emir, an elderly man with a young wife—his youngest—both of whom are in London. He’s quite ill, which accounts for the medical equipment in the basement, a great deal of equipment. Rank and money have their privileges everywhere, but especially here in Bahrain. Your friend the sultan of Oman made this possible for you.’
‘But someone had to make it possible for him to know what happened—for him to make it possible!’
‘That was me, of course—’
‘I do know you,’ interrupted Kendrick, frowning. ‘I just can’t remember where or how.’
‘I wasn’t dressed like this, and we saw each other under equally unpleasant circumstances. In Masqat, in a dark, filthy alleyway that serves as a street—’
‘Rot town!’ cried Evan, eyes wide, head rigid. ‘Slime town. El-Baz. You’re the woman with the gun; you tried to kill me.’
‘No, not true. I was protecting myself from four thugs, three men and a girl.’
Kendrick briefly closed his eyes. ‘I remember that. A kid in cut-off khakis holding his arm.’
‘He wasn’t a kid,’ objected Khalehla. ‘He was a drug addict as stretched out as his girlfriend and they both would have killed me to pay their Arab suppliers for what they needed. I was following you, nothing more, nothing less. Information, that’s my job.’
‘For whom?’
‘The people I work for.’
‘How did you know about me?’
‘That I won’t answer.’
‘Whom do you work for?’
‘In the broad sense, an organization that seeks to find solutions for the multiple horrors of the Middle East.’
‘Israeli?’
‘No,’ replied Khalehla calmly. ‘My roots are Arab.’
‘That doesn’t tell me a damn thing but it sure scares me.’
‘Why? Is it so impossible for an American to think we Arabs might want to find equitable solutions?’
‘I’ve just come from the embassy in Masqat. What I saw there wasn’t pretty—Arab pretty.’
‘Nor to us. However, may I quote an American congressman who said on the floor of the House of Representatives that “a terrorist isn’t born, he’s made.”‘
Astonished, Evan looked hard at the woman. ‘That was the only comment I ever made for the Congressional Record. The only one.’
‘You did so after a particularly vicious speech by a congressman from California who practically called for the wholesale slaughter of all Palestinians living in what he termed Eretz Israel.’