'In an emergency they would understand.'
'If you allowed such an emergency, they would slit your throat with a shearing knife and replace you!'
'You take care of your sources and I'll take care of mine, Mr. Blue.'
'I will take care of mine. Here, now. We go to the embassy!'
The winds from the Gulf of Oman swept over the scrubby grass and the gnarled, dwarfed trees, but they could not prohibit the sound of the persistent two-note siren in the distance coming up from the desert valley. It was the signal. Conceal yourselves. Kendrick expected it.
'Run!' roared Yosef, grabbing Azra's shoulder and propelling his superior forward on the road. 'Run, my brothers, as you have never run before in your lives!'
'The embassy!' cried the man called Blue. 'Before the light comes up!'
For Evan Kendrick, congressman from the ninth district of Colorado, the nightmare that would live with him the rest of his life was about to begin.
The Icarus Agenda
Chapter 9
Khalehla gasped. Her eyes had been suddenly drawn to the rearview mirror—a speck of light, an image of black upon darker black, something. And then it was there. Far away on the hill above Masqat, a car was following her! There were no headlights, just a dark, moving shadow in the distance. It was rounding a curve on the deserted road that led to the twisting descent into the valley—to the beginning of the sands of Jabal Sham where the 'escape' was to take place. There was only one entrance to and one exit from the desert valley and her strategy had been to drive off the road out of sight and follow Evan Kendrick and his fellow fugitives on foot once they had broken out of the van. That strategy was now void.
Oh, my God, I can't be caught! They'll kill every hostage in the embassy! What have I done? Get out. Get away!
Khalehla spun the wheel; the powerful car swung around on the soft, sandy earth, leaping over ruts on the primitive road and reversing its direction. She slammed her foot on the accelerator, stabbing it into the floor, and within moments, her headlights on high beam, she passed the car now rushing towards her. A figure beside the astonished driver tried to lunge down, concealing his face and body, but it was impossible.
And Khalehla did not believe what she saw!
But then she had to. In a sudden moment of utter clarity she saw it was so right, so perfect—so unmistakably perfect. Tony! Fumbling, bumbling, inarticulate Anthony MacDonald. The company reject whose position was secure because the firm was owned by his wife's father but who was nevertheless sent to Cairo, where he could do the least damage. A representative without portfolio, apart from hosting dinner parties where he and his equally inept and boring wife invariably got drunk. It was as though a company memorandum had been tattooed on their foreheads: Not permitted in the UK except for obligatory family funerals. Return flight tickets mandatory. How perfectly ingenious! The overweight, over-indulged, underbrained fop in sartorial plumage that could not hide his excesses. The Scarlet Pimpernel could not have matched his cover, and it was a cover, Khalehla was convinced of it. In building one for herself she had forced a master to expose his own.
She tried to think back, to reconstruct how he had snared her, but the steps were blurred because she had not thought about it at the time. She had no reason whatsoever to doubt that Tony MacDonald, the alcoholic cipher, was beside himself at the thought of travelling to Oman alone without someone knowledgeable beside him. He had complained several times, nearly trembling, that his firm had accounts in Masqat and he was expected to service them despite the horrors going on over there. She had replied—several times—with comforting words that it was basically a US-Israeli problem, not a British one, so he would not be harmed. It was as though he had expected her to be sent there, and when the orders came she had remembered his fears and telephoned him, believing he was her perfect escort to Oman. Oh, just perfect!
My God, what a network he must have! she thought. A little over an hour ago he was apparently paralysed with alcohol, making an ass of himself in a hotel bar, and here he was at five o'clock in the morning following her in a large blacked-out car. One assumption was unavoidable: He had put her under twenty-four-hour surveillance and picked her up after she had driven out of the palace gate, which meant that his informers had unearthed her connection to the sultan of Oman. But for whom was the profoundly clever MacDonald playing out his charade, a cover that gave him access to an efficient Omani network of informers and drivers of powerful vehicles at any hour of the day and night in this besieged country where every foreigner was put under a microscope? Which side was he on, and if it was the wrong one, for how many years had the ubiquitous Tony MacDonald been playing his murderous game?
Who was behind him? Did this contradictory Englishman's visit to Oman have anything to do with Evan Kendrick? Ahmat had spoken cautiously, abstractly, about the American congressman's covert objective in Masqat but would not elaborate except to say that no theory should be overlooked no matter how implausible it seemed. He revealed only that the former construction engineer from Southwest Asia believed that the bloody seizure of the embassy might be traced to a man and an industrial conspiracy whose origins were perceived four years ago in Saudi Arabia—perceived, not proved. It was far more than she had been told by her own people. Yet an intelligent, successful American did not risk going under cover among terrorists without extraordinary convictions. For Ahmat, sultan of Oman and fan of the New England Patriots football team, this was enough. Apart from getting him here, Washington would not acknowledge him, would not help him. 'But we can, I can!' Ahmat had exclaimed. And now Anthony MacDonald was a profoundly disturbing factor in the terrorist equation.
Her professional instincts demanded that she walk away, race away, but Khalehla could not do that. Something had happened; someone had altered the delicate balances of past and impending violence. She would not call for a small jet to fly her out of an unknown, rock-based plateau to Cairo. Not yet. Not yet. Not now! There was too much to learn and so little time! She could not stop!
'Don't stop!' roared the obese MacDonald, clutching the hand strap above his seat as he yanked his heavy body upright. 'She was driving out here for a reason, certainly not for pleasure at this hour.'
'She may have seen you, Effendi.'
'Not likely, but if she did I'm merely a client tricked by a whore. Keep going and switch on your lights. Someone may be waiting for them and we have to know who it is.'
'Whoever it is may be unfriendly, sir.'
'In which case I'm just another drunken infidel you've been hired by the firm to protect from his own outrageous behaviour. No different from other times, old sport.'
'As you wish, Effendi.' The driver turned on the headlights.
'What's ahead?' asked MacDonald.
'Nothing, sir. Only an old road that leads down to the Jabal Sham.'
'What the hell is that?'
'The start of the desert. It ends with the far off mountains that are the Saudi borders.'
'Are there other roads?'
'A number of kilometers to the east and less passable, sir, very difficult.'
'When you say there's nothing ahead, exactly what do you mean?'
'Exactly what I said, sir. Only the road to the Jabal Sham.'
'But this road, the one we're on,' pressed the Englishman. 'Where does it go?'
'It does not, sir. It turns left into the road down to the—’
'This Jabal-whatever,' completed MacDonald, interrupting. 'I see. So we're not talking about two roads, but one that happens to head left down to your bloody desert.'