‘I don’t want to hear any of that spook bullshit! Get out of there!’
Khalehla winced as Frank Swann slammed down the telephone in Washington DC.
‘The Aradous and the Tylos, I know them both,’ said Emmanuel Weingrass into the phone in the small, secure office at the airport in Muharraq. T. Farouk and Strickland—good God, I can’t believe it! That daffodil drunk from Cairo?… Oh, sorry, Stinker, I forgot. I mean that French lilac from Algiers, that’s what I meant to say. Go on.’ Weingrass wrote down the information from Masqat, given by a young man for whom he was beginning to have enormous respect. He knew men twice Ahmat’s age and with three times his experience who would have buckled under the stress the sultan of Oman was enduring, not excluding the outrageous Western press that had no concept of his courage. The courage for risks that could bring about his downfall and his death. ‘Okay, I’ve got it all… Hey, Stinker, you’re quite a guy. You grew up to be a real mensch. Of course, you probably learned it all from me.’
‘I learned one thing from you, Manny, a very important truth. That was to face things as they were and not to make excuses. Whether it was for fun or in pain, you said. You told me a person could live with failure but not with the excuses that took away his right to fail. It took me a long time to understand that.’
‘That’s very nice of you, young fellow. Pass it on to the kid I read you’re expecting. Call it the Weingrass addendum to the Ten Commandments.’
‘But, Manny—’
‘Yes?’
‘Please don’t wear one of those yellow or red polka-dotted bow ties in Bahrain. They kind of mark you, you know what I mean?’
‘Now you’re my tailor… I’ll be in touch, mensch. Wish us all good hunting.’
‘I do, my friend. Above all, I wish I could be with you.’
‘I know that. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know it—if our friend didn’t know it.’ Weingrass hung up the phone and turned to the six men behind him. They were perched on tables and chairs, several holding their small secondary side arms, others checking the battery charges in their hand-held radios, all watching and listening intently to the old man.
‘We split up,’ he said. ‘Ben-Ami and Grey will come with me to the Tylos. Blue, you take the others to the Aradous Hotel—’ Manny stopped, gripped by a sudden coughing seizure; his face reddened and his slender frame shook violently. Ben-Ami and the members of the Masada unit glanced at one another; none moved, each knowing instinctively that Weingrass would rebuff any assistance. But one thing was clear to all of them. They were looking at a dying man.
‘Water?’ asked Ben-Ami.
‘No,’ replied Manny curtly, the coughing seizure subsiding. ‘Lousy chest cold, lousy weather in France… All right, where were we?’
‘I was to take the others to the Aradous Hotel,’ answered Yaakov, code name Blue.
‘Get yourself some decent clothes so you won’t get thrown out of the lobby. There are shops here in the airport, clean jackets will be enough.’
‘These are our working clothes,’ objected Black.
‘Paper bag ’em,’ said Weingrass.
‘What are we to do at the Aradous?’ Blue got off the table he was sitting on.
Manny looked down at his notes, then up at the young leader. ‘In Room two-zero-one is a man called Azra.’
‘Arabic for “blue”,’ interrupted code Red, glancing at Yaakov.
‘He’s on the terrorist council in Masqat,’ broke in Orange. ‘They say he led the team that stormed the Teverya kibbutz near the Galilee, killing thirty-two, including nine children.’
‘He planted bombs in three settlements on the West Bank,’ added Grey, ‘and blew up a pharmacy, paint-spraying the name “Azra” on a wall. After the blast the wall was pieced together like a puzzle, and there it was. The name Azra. I’ve seen him on television.’
‘Pig,’ said Yaakov quietly, adjusting the straps of his weapon under the jacket. ‘When we get to the Aradous, what do we do? Give him tea and cakes or just a medal for humanitarianism?’
‘You stay out of his sight!’ replied Weingrass harshly. ‘But don’t let him out of yours. Two of you get rooms near his; watch the door. Don’t get a glass of water, don’t go to the toilet, just watch his door every minute. The two others take up positions in the street, one in front, the other by the employees’ exit. Stay in radio contact with each other. Work out simple codes, one-word codes—in Arabic. If he moves, you move with him, but don’t let him suspect for even a moment that you’re there. Remember, he’s as good as you are; he’s had to survive, too.’
‘Are we silently escorting him to a private dinner party?’ asked code Blue sarcastically. ‘This is a plan without the most rudimentary blueprint!’
‘The blueprint will come from Kendrick,’ said Manny, for once not rising to the insult. ‘If he really has one,’ he added softly, concern in his voice.
‘What?’ Ben-Ami rose from his chair, not, however, in anger but in astonishment.
‘If everything goes according to schedule, he’ll pick up the Arab at ten o’clock. With his Masqat terrorist in tow, he expects to make contact with one of the Mahdi’s agents, someone who can lead them either to the Mahdi himself or to someone else who can.’
‘On what basis?’ asked the incredulous Ben-Ami from the Mossad.
‘Actually, it’s not bad. The Mahdi’s people think there’s an emergency, but they don’t know what it is.’
‘An amateur!’ roared code Red of the Masada unit. ‘There’ll be back-ups, and blind drones, and back-ups for them. What the hell are we doing here?’
‘You’re here to take out the back-ups and the drones and the back-ups behind them!” shouted Weingrass in reply. ‘If I have to tell you what to look for, go back and start all over again with the Boy Scouts in Tel Aviv. You follow; you protect; you take out the bad guys. You clear a path for that amateur who’s putting his life on the line. This Mahdi’s the key, and if you haven’t understood that by now, there’s nothing I can do about it. One word from him, preferably with a gun to his head, and everything stops in Oman.’
‘It’s not without merit,’ said Ben-Ami.
‘But it’s without sense!’ cried Yaakov. ‘Suppose this Kendrick does reach your Mahdi. What does he do, what does he say?’ Code Blue shifted to a broad caricature of an American accent. ‘”Say, pardner, Ah gotta hell of a deal for you, buddy. You call off your dumb goons and Ah’ll give you mah new leather boots.” Ridiculous! He’ll be shot in the head the moment he’s asked “What’s the emergency?”‘
‘That’s not without merit, either,’ repeated Ben-Ami.
‘Lawyers now I’ve got!’ yelled Manny. ‘You think my son is stupid? He built a construction empire on mishegoss? The minute he has something concrete—a name, a location, a company—he contacts Masqat, and our mutual friend, the sultan, calls the Americans, the British, the French and anyone else he trusts who’s set up shop in Oman and they go to work. Their people here in Bahrain close in.’
‘Merit,’ said Ben-Ami once again, nodding.
‘Not totally without,’ agreed code Black.
‘And what will you be doing?’ asked a somewhat subdued yet still challenging Yaakov.
‘Caging a fat fox who’s been devouring a lot of chickens in a coop no one ever knew about,’ said Weingrass.
Kendrick’s eyes snapped open. A sound, a scrape—an intrusion on the silence of the bedroom that had nothing to do with the traffic outside the tall windows. It was closer, more personal, somehow intimate. Yet it was not the woman, Khalehla; she was gone. He blinked for a moment at the indented pillows beside him, and despite everything that his mind was putting together, he felt a sudden sadness. For those brief few hours with her he had cared, feeling a warmth between them that was only a part of their frantic love-making, which in itself would not have happened without that sense of warmth.
What time was it? He turned his wrist and—his watch was not there. Goddamn it, the bitch still had it! He rolled over on the bed and swung his legs out on the floor without regard for the sheet covering him. The soles of his feet landed on hard objects; he looked down at the polar-bear white rug and blinked again. Everything that had been in his pockets was there—everything but the pack of cigarettes which he very much wanted at the moment. And then his eyes were drawn to a gold-bordered page of notepaper on the bedside table; he picked it up.
I think we were both kind to each other when each of us needed some kindness. No regrets other than one. I won’t see you again. Goodbye.