The Icarus Agenda

'We can't leave this room except to leave the house.'

'Why not?'

'Those are the arrangements. The Emir doesn't care for his cousin's young wife; therefore, the defilement caused by your person is restricted to her quarters. There are guards outside to enforce the order.'

'I don't believe this!'

'I didn't make up the rules, I simply got you a place to stay.'

His eyes closing, Kendrick rolled back on the bed and over to the far side, holding up the sheet to negotiate the distance. 'All right, Miss Cairo. Unless you want to keep slipping off that silly-looking couch or fall flat on your face on the floor, here's your siesta pad. Before you relent, two things: Don't snore, and make sure I'm up by eight-thirty.'

Twenty agonizing minutes later, unable to keep her eyes open and having fallen off the chaise-lounge twice, Khalehla crept into the bed.

The incredible happened, incredible because neither expected it, nor was it sought, nor had either remotely considered the possibility. Two frightened, exhausted people felt each other's presence and, more asleep than awake, drew closer, at first touching, then slowly, haltingly, reaching, finally holding, grasping at each other; swollen, parted lips seeking, searching, desperately needing the moist contact that promised release from their fears. They made love in a burst of frenzy—not as strangers imitating animals, but as a man and a woman who had communicated, and somehow knew that there had to be a touch of warmth, of comfort, in a world gone mad.

'I suppose I should say I'm sorry,' said Evan, his head on the pillows, his chest heaving as if he were swallowing his last breaths of air.

'Please don't,' said Khalehla quietly. 'I'm not sorry. Sometimes… sometimes we all need to be reminded that we're part of the human race. Weren't those your words?'

'In a different context, I think.'

'Not really. Not when you really think about it… Go to sleep, Evan Kendrick. I won't say your name again.'

'What does that mean?'

'Go to sleep.'

Three hours later, nearly to the minute, Khalehla got out of the bed, picked up her clothes from the white carpet and, glancing at the unconscious American, quietly dressed. She wrote a note on a sheet of royal stationery and placed it on the bedside table next to the phone. She then went to the dressing table, opened a drawer and removed Kendrick's possessions, including the gun, the knife, the watch and his money belt. She put everything on the floor by the bed except the half-used pack of American cigarettes, which she crushed and shoved into her pocket. She crossed to the door and silently let herself out.

'Ismah!' she whispered to the uniformed Bahrainian guard, telling him in a single word to heed her orders. 'He is to be awakened at precisely eight-thirty. I myself will contact this royal house to see that it is done. Do you understand?"

'Iwah, iwah!' replied the guard, stiff-necked and nodding his head in obedience.

'There may be a phone call for him, asking for “the visitor”. It's to be intercepted, the information written down, placed in an envelope and pushed under the door. I'll clear it with the authorities. They're just names and telephone numbers of people doing business with his firm. Understood?'

'Iwah, iwah!'

'Good.' Khalehla gently, pointedly placed Bahrainian diners worth fifty American dollars into the guard's pocket. He was hers for a lifetime, or at least for five hours. She walked down the ornate curved staircase to the enormous foyer and the carved front door, which was opened by another guard bowing obsequiously. She went out on the bustling pavement, where robes and dark business suits rushed in both directions, and looked for a public telephone. She saw one on the corner and moved quickly towards it.

'This call will be accepted, I assure you, operator,' said Khalehla, having given the numbers she had been instructed to give in an extreme emergency.

'Yes?' The voice five thousand miles away was harsh, abrupt.

'My name is Khalehla. You're the one I was to reach, I believe.'

'No one else. The operator said Bahrain. Do you confirm it?'

'Yes. He's here. I've been with him for several hours.'

'What's going down?'

'There's a meeting between eleven-thirty and midnight near the Juma Mosque and the Al Halifax Road. I should be there, sir. He's not equipped; he can't handle it.'

'No way, lady!'

'He's a child where these people are concerned! I can help!'

'You can also involve us, which is out of the question and you know it as well as I do! Now, get out of there!'

'I thought you'd say that… sir. But may I please explain what I consider to be the negative odds of the equation in this particular operation?'

'I don't want to hear any of that spook bullshit! Get out of there!'

Khalehla winced as Frank Swann slammed down the telephone in Washington DC.

'The Aradous and the Tylos, I know them both,' said Emmanuel Weingrass into the phone in the small, secure office at the airport in Muharraq. T. Farouk and Strickland—good God, I can't believe it! That daffodil drunk from Cairo?… Oh, sorry, Stinker, I forgot. I mean that French lilac from Algiers, that's what I meant to say. Go on.' Weingrass wrote down the information from Masqat, given by a young man for whom he was beginning to have enormous respect. He knew men twice Ahmat's age and with three times his experience who would have buckled under the stress the sultan of Oman was enduring, not excluding the outrageous Western press that had no concept of his courage. The courage for risks that could bring about his downfall and his death. 'Okay, I've got it all… Hey, Stinker, you're quite a guy. You grew up to be a real mensch. Of course, you probably learned it all from me.'

'I learned one thing from you, Manny, a very important truth. That was to face things as they were and not to make excuses. Whether it was for fun or in pain, you said. You told me a person could live with failure but not with the excuses that took away his right to fail. It took me a long time to understand that.'

'That's very nice of you, young fellow. Pass it on to the kid I read you're expecting. Call it the Weingrass addendum to the Ten Commandments.'

'But, Manny—’

'Yes?'

'Please don't wear one of those yellow or red polka-dotted bow ties in Bahrain. They kind of mark you, you know what I mean?'

'Now you're my tailor… I'll be in touch, mensch. Wish us all good hunting.'

'I do, my friend. Above all, I wish I could be with you.'

'I know that. I wouldn't be here if I didn't know it—if our friend didn't know it.' Weingrass hung up the phone and turned to the six men behind him. They were perched on tables and chairs, several holding their small secondary side arms, others checking the battery charges in their hand-held radios, all watching and listening intently to the old man.

'We split up,' he said. 'Ben-Ami and Grey will come with me to the Tylos. Blue, you take the others to the Aradous Hotel—' Manny stopped, gripped by a sudden coughing seizure; his face reddened and his slender frame shook violently. Ben-Ami and the members of the Masada unit glanced at one another; none moved, each knowing instinctively that Weingrass would rebuff any assistance. But one thing was clear to all of them. They were looking at a dying man.

'Water?' asked Ben-Ami.

'No,' replied Manny curtly, the coughing seizure subsiding. 'Lousy chest cold, lousy weather in France… All right, where were we?'

'I was to take the others to the Aradous Hotel,' answered Yaakov, code name Blue.

'Get yourself some decent clothes so you won't get thrown out of the lobby. There are shops here in the airport, clean jackets will be enough.'

'These are our working clothes,' objected Black.

'Paper bag 'em,' said Weingrass.

'What are we to do at the Aradous?' Blue got off the table he was sitting on.

Manny looked down at his notes, then up at the young leader. 'In Room two-zero-one is a man called Azra.'