'It's finished here. I'm finished. I'll leave.'
'The hell you will! You're seeing my doctor, who'd better know his marbles, and then you move in with me. Christ, I haven't had a cause in almost two years!'
Praise God and Allah, and all those other deities above. I have a friend. And somehow, within the pain and the hatred of those days, an idea was born that grew into a commitment. An eighteen-year-old girl knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
The telephone rang. The past was finished, over, the present was everything! She ran to the bedside phone, yanking it out of its cradle. 'Yes?'
'He's here.'
'Where?'
'The embassy.'
'Oh, my God! What's happening? What's he doing?'
'He's with two others—’
'There are three, not four?'
'We have only seen three. One is at the gate among the beggars. He's been talking to the terrorists inside.'
'The American! Where is he?'
'With the third man. The two of them stay in the shadows, only the first man shows himself. He is the one who makes the decisions, not the American.'
'What do you mean?'
'We think he's making arrangements for them to go inside.'
'No!' screamed Khalehla. 'They can't—he can't, he mustn't! Stop them, stop him!'
'Such orders should come from the palace, madame—’
'Such orders come from me! You've been told! The prisoner compound was one thing, but not the embassy, never the embassy, not for him! Go out and take them, stop them, kill them if you have to! Kill him!'
'Hurry!' cried the robed Arab running to his colleague in the front of the boarded-up restaurant and cracking the bolt of his machine gun into the firing position. 'Our orders are to take them now, stop them, stop the American. Kill him, if we must.'
'Kill him?' asked the astonished official from the palace.
'Those are the orders. Kill him!'
'The orders have come too late. They're gone.'
Ultra Maximum Secure
No Existing Intercepts
Proceed
The figure in the dark sterile room touched the letters of the keyboard with angry precision.
I've broken the Langley access codes and it's madness! Not the CIA, for the liaison is withholding nothing. Instead, the insanity is with the subject. He has gone into the embassy! He can't survive. He'll be found out—in the toilet, at a meal with or without utensils, with a single reaction to a phrase. He's been away too long! I've factored in every possibility and my appliances offer little hope. Perhaps my appliances and I were too quick to render judgment. Perhaps our national messiah is no more than a fool, but then all messiahs have been considered fools and idiots until proved otherwise. That is my hope, my prayer.
The Icarus Agenda
Chapter 11
The three escaped prisoners crawled in the darkness up through the ancient, moss-laden sewer line to a gridded opening on the stone floor of the embassy's east courtyard. Struggling, their hands and feet scraped and bloodied, they emerged into the dazzling sunlight only to be met by a scene Evan Kendrick wished with all his being had remained in darkness. Sixty or more hostages had been removed from the roof to the courtyard for their meagre morning food and ablutions. A latrine consisted of wooden planks with circular holes above planter boxes, the men separated from the women by a large, transparent screen ripped from one of the embassy's windows. The degradation was complete in that the guards, male and female, walked back and forth in front of the hostages, male and female, laughing and making loud jokes about the functional difficulties their captives were experiencing. The toilet paper, tauntingly held out beyond the reach of trembling hands before it was finally delivered, consisted of print-outs from the embassy's computers.
Across the way, in full view of the frightened, humiliated people at the planks, the hostages had formed a line leading to three long, narrow tables with rows of metal plates holding dry bread and small wedges of questionable cheese. Spaced between were filthy pitchers filled with a greyish-white liquid, presumably diluted goat's milk, which was poured sparingly into the prisoners' wooden bowls by a group of armed terrorists behind the tables. Every now and then a hostage was refused a plate or a ladle of milk; pleading was futile; it resulted in a slap or a fist or a ladle in the face when the cries were too loud.
Suddenly, as Kendrick's eyes were still adjusting to the harsh light, a young prisoner, a boy of no more than fourteen or fifteen, tears streaming down his face, his features contorted, screamed in defiance. 'You lousy bastard! My mother's sick! She keeps throwing up from this crap! Give her something decent, you sons of bitches—’
The boy's words were cut short by the barrel of a rifle across his face, tearing his left cheek. Instead of subduing the youngster, the blow infuriated him. He lunged across the table, grabbing the shirt of the man with the rifle, tearing it off his chest, sending metal plates and pitchers crashing down from the table. In seconds, the terrorists were on him, pulling him away from the bearded man he was wrestling to the ground, pummelling him with rifle butts and kicking his writhing body on the courtyard stone. Several other male hostages, their anger and courage aroused by the boy's action, rushed forward shouting with weak, hoarse voices, their arms flailing pathetically against their arrogant, far stronger enemies. What followed was a brutal suppression of the mini revolt. As the hostages fell they were beaten unconscious and kicked like carcasses being thumped and processed in a slaughter house.
'Animals!' roared an old man, holding his trousers and walking unsteadily forward from the planks, his resolve and dignity intact. 'Arab animals! Arab savages! Have none of you a shred of civilized decency? Does beating to death weak defenceless men make you heroes of Islam? If so, take me and issue yourselves more medals, but in the name of God, stop what you're doing!'
'Whose God?' shouted a terrorist over the body of the unconscious boy. 'A Christian Jesus whose followers arm our enemies so they can massacre our children with bombs and cannons? Or a wandering Messiah whose people steal our lands and kill our fathers and mothers? Get your Gods straight!'
'Enough!' commanded Azra, striding rapidly forward. Kendrick followed, unable to control himself, thinking that moments before he might have grabbed the MAC-10 weapon off Blue's shoulder and fired into the terrorists. Standing above the bloodied youngster, Azra continued, his voice casual. 'The lesson's been taught; don't overteach it or you'll numb those you want to instruct. Take these people down to the infirmary, to the hostage doctor… and find the boy's mother. Take her there also and get her a meal.'
'Why, Azra?' protested the Palestinian. 'No such consideration was shown my mother! She was—’
'Nor to mine,' broke in Blue firmly, stopping the man. 'And look at us now. Take this child down and let him stay with his mother. Have someone speak to them about over-zealousness and pretend to care.'
Kendrick watched in revulsion while the limp, bleeding bodies were carried away. 'You did the right thing,' he said to Azra in English, his words coldly noncommittal, talking like a technician. 'One doesn't always want to but one has to know when to stop.'
The new prince of terrorists studied Evan through opaque eyes. 'I meant what I said. Look at us now. The death of our own makes us different. One day we're children, the next we are grown up, no matter the years, and we are experts at death for the memories never leave us.'
'I understand.'
'No, you don't, Amal Bahrudi. Yours is an ideological war. For you death is a political act. You are a passionate believer, I have no doubt—but still what you believe is politics. That's not my war. I have no ideology but survival, so that I can extract death for death—and still survive.'