Qazi stood on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the zoo. A dirty brown sedan, much battered, stopped at the curb. Noora was at the wheel. Ali was beside her in the front seat and another man, about twenty-five, sat in the rear. He opened the door for Qazi.
As soon as the car was in motion, Qazi opened the attaché case. It was empty except for a stack of paper almost two inches thick, held together with rubber bands. He pulled away the top sheet, which was blank, and examined the next. He was looking at a copy machine copy of a photograph. The photo was of the cover of a document marked “Mk-58” and “Top Secret” in inch-high black letters. On the lower right was a printed four-digit number and a hand-lettered inked notation “2 of 3.”
Qazi placed the document in an empty shopping bag that sat waiting on the floor. He passed the attache case to the man beside him. “Wipe it off.”
In the front seat, Ali turned and watched with raised eyebrows.
“A man watched my meet with the general. He chased me. I shot him.”
“We heard the sirens.”
“Who?” Ali asked.
“I don’t know.”
The car stopped shortly thereafter and Ali walked over to a large green trash barrel near a cross walk, deposited the attache case, then returned to the car.
At the next traffic light, Ali looked over his shoulder at Qazi and said, “The United States will anchor in Naples seven days from now.”
“For how long?”
“The hotel reservations are for eight nights.”
“Any particular hotel?”
“Over a dozen reservations at the Vittorio Emanuele. Some reservations elsewhere.”
“Noora,” he said to the girl, “get us two rooms at the Vittorio. Suites, if possible, doubles at least. And stay out of sight.” She nodded.
Qazi turned to the young man beside him. “As soon as you learn which rooms will be assigned to the Americans, Yasim, wire as many as possible.” Yasim was a rarity, an Arab with mechanical talent. He had been the star pupil of the national university’s engineering department when Qazi had discovered him.
“Ali, you set the plan in motion. I will join you at home tomorrow.” Qazi kept checking the rear window as Noora threaded through the traffic onto the Via Tiburtina eastbound. When they came to the limited-access highway that circled Rome, Noora merged with the traffic in the high-speed lane headed south as Qazi checked behind them repeatedly.
An hour later Noora dropped Qazi near Castel Sant’Angelo and sped away. The colonel now wore a short-sleeve, open-neck pullover shirt with a little alligator on the left breast. He walked west on the Via della Conciliazione. Old medieval buildings rose four and five stories above the street on either side, while ahead of him he could see the facade of St. Peter’s. Several blocks short of St. Peter’s Square, he turned right into a side street. He walked under the ancient Roman wall that arched above the street and kept going, into one of the more expensive quarters of Rome. After several blocks, he entered a quiet hotel with a tiny lobby.
“I say, old chap,” he hailed the desk clerk. “Have you any messages or calls for me? Name’s MacPhee. Room 306.”
“No, Signor MacPhee,” the clerk said after looking in the key box. “There is nothing.” Qazi would have been astounded if there had been. No one, not even Ali, knew he was here. He had checked in this morning, before he walked the three miles to the Villa Borghese.
“Grazie!” the new Signor MacPhee murmured as the clerk handed him the key.
Dusk had fallen and the street below his window was lit with lights from the bar across the street when Qazi finally tossed the last of the photocopied pages on the bed and gazed out his window. Without conscious effort his gaze moved from figure to figure on the sidewalk below, then roved over the parked automobiles.
His eyes ached from four hours of reading. He stretched, then slouched down in a chair and stared at the manual lying on the bed. After a few moments he picked up his pistol from the writing desk where he had been reading, turned off the light and stretched out on the bed. He laid the pistol on top of the manual.
When he awoke, the room was illuminated only by the glare of streetlights coming in the window. He checked his watch. Eleven o’clock. He lay in the darkness listening.
After twenty minutes he arose, tucked the pistol into its ankle holster, and placed the manual back in the shopping bag. He locked the room door behind him and descended the maid’s staircase all the way to the basement. The hallway was silent and dark. The eyes of a scurrying mouse reflected the glare from his pocket flashlight. The coal furnace was in the second room on his right. It looked exactly as it did two months ago when he selected this hotel because it had this furnace.
He opened the chimney flue and the firebox door. He placed a dozen pages inside the firebox. Soon the fire was burning nicely. He fed the pages in a few at a time. It took half an hour. When all the pages were cold ashes, Qazi latched the furnace door, closed the flue, and climbed the stairs back to his room.
There was a telephone book in the nightstand beside the bed. Qazi looked up a number and dialed it. After two rings a man’s voice said in English, “You have reached the Israeli embassy. May I help you?”
Qazi cradled the receiver. He stared at the listing in the telephone book and repeated the number several times to himself. Then he replaced the book in the nightstand.
“But he did not have the manual when he got off the airplane this afternoon,” Ali protested.
El Hakim set his jaw. “What did he do with it?”
“Your Excellency, he must have read it and destroyed it”
“Why?”
“He obviously has no further use for it, Excellency.” Ali shrugged helplessly.
I’m sure he doesn’t, El Hakim thought savagely. Qazi has just made himself the indispensable man. This little episode is his life insurance- El Hakim smote the table with his fist, then rose and went to his large world globe. He twirled it with a finger and watched it spin. He hated to be thwarted by anyone, but especially by one of his lieutenants whom he did not trust. It was infuriating. He slapped the globe and it spun so fast the colors blurred. He adjusted the collar of his fatigue shirt and his pistol belt as he watched the globe spin down. He pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger and tried to think like Qazi. Qazi was a devious man, a dangerous man. A far too dangerous man.
“Jarvis,” he muttered finally under his breath. He turned and grinned wolfishly at Ali. “Jarvis,” he repeated aloud.
10
Who wrote this piece of shit?”
The three officers on the other side of the desk sagged visibly.
Jake Grafton arranged his brand new glasses on his nose and read from the accident report in front of him. “‘It is believed that a failure in the liquid oxygen system led to the loss of this aircraft. However, due to the loss of the airframe at sea, the precise cause of this accident will never be known.’” Jake looked up. The three faces across the desk were blurred. He took off the glasses. “I won’t sign that.”
None of the three said anything.
“Has the Naval Safety Center got any record of any other F-14 lost this way? Have you torn down a LOX system and tried to identify possible components that might fail? What does the Grumman rep have to say? Maybe the connection from the oxygen container and the aircraft’s system wasn’t hooked up right. What connectors or filters or whatever could have failed and allowed ambient air to dilute a flow of pure oxygen? You guys have got to answer these questions.”