He threw up in the garage. Mustn’t think. He walked to the liquor cabinet and took out a bottle of vodka. His stomach heaved up the vodka. The second time it stayed down. He took the pistol from his pocket and threw it behind the kitchen stove where he could not reach it. The bottle again, and again. Half of it was gone and it was running down his shirt front, running down his neck. The bottle again, and again. His head was swimming. I mustn’t throw up. Hold it down. He was crying. The vodka was hitting him now. He sat down on the kitchen floor. Two more weeks and I’ll be dead. Oh, thank God, I’ll be dead. Everybody else will be too. Where it’s quiet. And nothing ever is. Oh, God, it has been so long. Oh, God, it has been so long. Jergens, you were right to kill yourself. Jergens! He was yelling now. He was up and staggering to the back door. He was yelling out the back door. Cold rain was blowing in his face as he yelled out into the yard. Jergens, you were right! And the back steps were coming up at him, and he rolled off into the dead grass and snow, and lay faceup in the rain. A last thought, consciousness glimmering out. Water is a good conductor of heat. Witness a million engines and my heart cold upon this ground.
It was quite late when Dahlia set her suitcase down in the living room and called his name. She looked in the workshop and then climbed the stairs.
“Michael.” The lights were on and the house was cold. She was uneasy. “Michael.” She went into the kitchen.
The back door was open. She ran to it. When she saw him she thought he was dead. His face was white with a bluish tinge and his hair was plastered flat by the cold rain. She knelt beside him and felt his chest through the soggy shirt. His heart was beating. Kicking off her high-heeled shoes, she dragged him toward the door. She could feel the freezing ground through her stockings. Groaning with the effort, she dragged him up the stairs and into the kitchen. She jerked the blankets off the guest-room bed and spread them on the floor beside him, stripped the soggy clothes off him and rolled him in the blankets. She rubbed him with a rough towel, and she sat beside him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. At daylight, his temperature was 105. He had viral pneumonia.
19
THE DELTA JET APPROACHED New Orleans over Lake Pontchartrain, maintaining considerable altitude over the water, then swooped down toward New Orleans International Airport. The swoop lifted Muhammad Fasil’s stomach unpleasantly, and he cursed under his breath.
Pneumonia! The woman’s precious pet got drunk and fell out in the rain! The fool was half delirious and weak as a kitten, the woman sitting beside him in the hospital, bleating expressions of pity. At least she would see to it that he kept his mouth shut about the mission. The chances of Lander being able to fly the Super Bowl in fifteen days were exactly nil, Fasil thought. When the stubborn-headed woman was finally convinced of that, when she saw that Lander could do nothing but puke in her hand, she would kill him and join Fasil in New Orleans. Fasil had her word for it.
Fasil was desperate. The truck bearing the bomb was moving toward New Orleans on schedule. Now he had a bomb and no delivery system. He must work out an alternate plan, and the place to do it was here, where the strike would be made. Hafez Najeer had erred very badly in allowing Dahlia Iyad to control this mission, Fasil told himself for the hundredth time. Well, she controlled it no longer. The new plan would be his.
The airport was jammed with the crowd arriving for the Sugar Bowl, the college invitational bowl game that would be played in Tulane Stadium in three days. Fasil called eight hotels. All were full. He had to take a room at the YMCA.
The cramped little room was quite a comedown from the Plaza in New York, where he had spent the previous night—the Plaza, with the national flags of foreign dignitaries hanging in front and a switchboard accustomed to placing international calls. The flags of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey hung among the others during the present United Nations session and calls to the Middle East were common. Fasil could have had a comfortable conversation with Beirut, arranging for the gunmen to report to New Orleans. He had finished encoding his message and was ready to make the call when he was interrupted by Dahlia on the telephone, telling him of Lander’s stupid debacle. Angrily, Fasil had torn up his message to Beirut and flushed it down his elegant Plaza toilet.
Now he was stuffed in this shabby cell in New Orleans with the plan a shambles. It was time to look over the ground. Fasil had never seen Tulane Stadium. He had depended on Lander for all that. Bitterly he walked outside and flagged a taxi.
How could he make the strike? He would have the truck. He would have the bomb. He could still send for a couple of gunmen. He would have the services of Dahlia Iyad, even if her infidel was out of it. Although Fasil was an atheist, he thought of Lander as an infidel, and he spat as he muttered the name.
The taxi mounted the U.S. 90 expressway over downtown New Orleans and headed southwest into the afternoon sun. The driver kept up a steady monologue in a dialect barely intelligible to Fasil.
“These bums now don’t want to work. They want something for nothing,” the driver was saying. “My sister’s kid used to work with me when I was plumbing, before my back went out. I never could find him half the time. You can’t do any plumbing by yourself. You have to come out from under the house too many times, you don’t have nobody to hand you stuff. That’s why my back went out, all the time crawling under and coming back out.”
Fasil wished the man would shut up. He did not shut up.
“That there’s the Superdome, which I think they’re never gonna finish. First they thought it would cost 168 million dollars, now it’s two hundred million dollars. Everybody says Howard Hughes bought it. What a mess. The sheet metal workers took a walk first, and then…”
Fasil looked at the great bulge of the domed stadium. Work was under way on it, even through the holiday. He could see tiny figures moving on it. There had been a scare in the early stages of the mission that the Superdome would be completed in time for the Super Bowl, rendering the blimp useless. But there were still big gaps visible in the roof. Not that it mattered now anyway, Fasil thought angrily.
He made a mental note to investigate the possible use of toxic gas in closed stadiums. That might be a useful technique at some future time.
The taxi shifted into the high-speed lane, the driver talking over his shoulder. “You know, they were gonna have the Super Bowl there, they thought for a while. Now they got a terrific cost overrun because the city thinks it looks bad, embarrassing you know, not to be through with it. Double time and a half they’re paying to work on it through the holidays, you know. Put on a show of really hustling to finish it by spring. I wouldn’t mind some of that overtime myself.”