‘Oh, he was city, all right. Fancy duds and slick-down hair.’
‘Dark hair, then?’
‘No, sorta’ reddish.’
‘Oh, him?’ said Varak convincingly. ‘Approximately my size.’
‘Nope, I’d say a mite taller, maybe more than a mite.’
‘Yes, of course,’ agreed the Czech. ‘I imagine we often think of ourselves as taller than we are. He’s somewhat slender, or perhaps it’s his height—’
‘That’s him,’ broke in the owner. ‘Not much meat on his bones, not like you, no sirree.’
‘Then he was driving the brown Lincoln.’
‘Looked blue to me, and big, but I don’t know one car from another these days. All look the same, like unhappy bugs.’
‘Well, thank you, sir. I’ll certainly tell the team to be more discreet. We wouldn’t want Manny upset.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me tellin’ him. Manny had a big operation and if young Evan thinks he needs closer watchin’, I’m for it. I mean, ol’ Manny, he’s a pistol—Gee-Gee even waters his whisky when he can get away with it.’
‘Thank you again. I’ll inform the congressman of your splendid co-operation.’
‘Thought you didn’t know him.’
‘When I meet him, sir. Goodbye.’
Milos Varak started the hired car and drove down the stretch of road, leaving behind the general store, the barber shop and Gee-Gee’s cafe. A tall, slender man with neatly combed reddish hair and driving a large blue car. The hunt had begun.
‘I don’t believe it!’ whispered Mitchell Jarvis Payton.
‘Believe, MJ,’ said Adrienne Rashad over the red-checked tablecloth at the rear of the Italian restaurant in Arlington. ‘What did you really know about Oman?’
‘It was a Four-Zero operation run by State and liaisoned by Lester Crawford, who wanted a list of our best people with the widest range of contacts in the southwest basin. That’s all I knew. There may be others more qualified than you, but not where contacts are concerned.’
‘You must have assumed the operation involved the hostages.’
‘Of course, we all did, and to tell you the truth I was torn. Your friendship with Ahmat and his wife was no secret to me, and I had to assume that others also knew. You see, I didn’t want to submit your name to Les, but your past work with Projects called for it and your ties to the royal family demanded it. Also, I realized that if I left you out for personal reasons and you ever learned about it, you’d have my head.’
‘I certainly would have.’
‘I’ll confess to a minor sin, however,’ said Payton, smiling a sad smile. ‘When it was all over I walked into Crawford’s office and made it clear that I understood the rules, but I must know that you were all right. He looked up at me with those fish eyes of his and said you were back in Cairo. I think it bothered him even to tell me that… And now you tell me that the whole damned operation was blown open by one of us! A Four-Zero strategy can’t be unsealed for years, often decades! There are records going back to World War Two that won’t see the light of day until the middle of the next century, if then.’
‘Who controls those records, MJ, those files?’
‘They’re carted off to oblivion—stored in warehouses around the country controlled by government custodians with armed guards and alarm systems so high-tech they reach instantly back to Washington, alerting us here, as well as the Departments of State and Defense and the White House strategy rooms. Of course for the past twenty years or so, with the proliferation of sophisticated computers, most are stored in data banks with access codes that have to be coordinated between a minimum of three intelligence services and the Oval Office. Where original documents are considered vital, they’re sealed and packed off.’ Payton shrugged, his palms upturned. ‘Oblivion, my dear. It’s all foolproof, theft proof.’
‘It obviously isn’t,’ disagreed the field agent from Cairo.
‘It is when those records reach the level of security controls,’ countered MJ. ‘So I think you’d better tell me everything you know and everything the congressman told you. Because if what you say is true, we’ve got a bastard somewhere between the decision to go maximum and the data banks.’
Adrienne Khalehla Rashad leaned back in the chair and began. She withheld nothing from her once and always ‘Uncle Mitch’, not even the sexual accident that had occurred in Bahrain. ‘I can’t say I’m sorry, professionally or otherwise, MJ. We were both stretched and scared and, frankly, he’s a hell of a decent man—out of his depth, but kind of fine, I guess. I reconfirmed it this morning in Maryland.’
‘In bed?’
‘Good Lord, no. In what he said, what he’s reaching for. Why he did what he did, why he even became a congressman and now wants out as I’ve told you. I’m sure he’s got warts all over him, but he’s also got a good anger.’
‘I think I detect certain feelings in my “niece” that I’ve wanted to see for a long, long time.’
‘Oh, they’re there, I’d be a hypocrite to deny them, but I doubt that there’s anything permanent. In a way, we’re alike. I’m projecting, but I think we’re both too consumed with what we have to do, as two separate people, and only then interested in what the other wants. Yet I like him, MJ, I really do like him. He makes me laugh, and not just at him but with him.’
‘That’s terribly important,’ said Payton wistfully, his smile and his gentle frown even sadder than before. ‘I’ve never found anyone who could genuinely make me laugh… not with her. Of course, it’s a flaw in my own make-up. I’m too damned demanding, and worse off for it.’
‘You have no flaws, or warts,’ insisted Rashad. ‘You’re my Uncle Mitch and I won’t hear of it.’
‘Your father always made your mother laugh. I envied them at times, despite the problems they faced. He did make her laugh.’
‘It was a defence mechanism. Mother thought he could say “divorce” three times and she’d have to split.’
‘Rubbish. He adored her.’ Then as deftly as if they had not strayed from the Masqat crisis, Payton returned to it. ‘Why did Kendrick insist on anonymity in the first place? I know you’ve told me, but run it by me again, will you?’
‘You sound suspicious and you shouldn’t be. It’s a perfectly logical explanation. He intended to go back and take up where he left off five—six years ago. He couldn’t do that with the baggage of Oman around his neck. He can’t do it now because everyone wants his head, from the Palestinian fanatics to Ahmat and all those who helped him and are frightened to death that they’ll be exposed. What’s happened to him during the past two days proves that he was right. He wants to go back and now he can’t. No one will let him.’
Again Payton frowned, the sadness gone, replaced by a cold curiosity that bordered on doubt. ‘Yes, I understand that, my dear, but then you have only his word that he wanted to go back—wants to go back.’
‘I believe him,’ said Rashad.
‘He may believe it himself,’ offered the director of Special Projects. ‘Now, as it were, having had second thoughts provoked by thinking things through.’
‘That’s cryptic as hell, MJ. What do you mean?’
‘It may be a minor point, but I think it’s worth considering. A man who wants to fade from Washington, really fade, and not open a law office or a public relations firm or some other such gratuity for the government service he sought, doesn’t usually do battle with Pentagon heavyweights in televised committee hearings, or go on a Sunday network programme that reaches the broadest audience in the country, or hold a provocative personal press conference guaranteed to get wide exposure. Nor does he continue to be a bete noire on a select subcommittee for intelligence, asking hard questions that may not promote his name in the public’s eyes but certainly circulates it around the capital. Taken collectively, those activities aren’t the mark of a man anxious to leave the political arena or the rewards it can offer. There’s a certain inconsistency, wouldn’t you say?’
Adrienne Rashad nodded. ‘I asked him about all that, at first accusing him of even wanting another on-the-scene testimonial from me, and suffering from a bad case of political ambition. He blew up, denying any such motives, insisting vehemently that he wanted only to get out of Washington.’
‘Could these be his second thoughts?’ suggested Payton. ‘I ask it kindly because any sane person would have them. Say this very successful individual—and he’s nothing if not an individualist; I’ve seen that for myself—gets a touch of our Potomac virus and tells himself to go for it, use all the marbles he’s got, including what he did in Oman. Then he wakes up and thinks, “My God, what have I done? What am I doing here? I don’t belong among these people!”… It wouldn’t be the first time, you know. We’ve lost a great many good men and women in this city who came to that same conclusion—they didn’t belong here. Most are fiercely independent people who believe in their judgments, generally borne out by success in one field or another. Unless they want power for the sheer sake of a driving ego—which your instincts about Kendrick would seem to dismiss and I trust your instincts—these people have no patience with the mazes of endless debate and compromise that are the by-products of our system. Could our congressman be someone like that?’