'I don't know!' shouted Anthony MacDonald coughing, tears rolling down his cheeks and jowls. 'Like everyone else I call telephone numbers—someone gets back to me! That's all I know!'
The commando's head snapped up. He was trained to hear things and sense vibrations others did not hear or sense. 'Get down! he whispered harshly to Ben-Ami and Weingrass. 'Roll to the walls! Behind chairs, anything!'
The hotel door crashed open. Three Arabs in sheer white robes, their faces concealed by cloth, lunged through the open space, their muted machine pistols on open-fire, their targets obvious: MacDonald and the Tylos doorman, whose screaming prostrate bodies thumped like jackhammers under the fusillade of bullets until no sounds came from their bleeding mouths. Suddenly the killers were aware of others in the room; they spun their weapons, slashing the air for new targets but there were none to be had for they were no competition for the lethal code Grey of the Masada Brigade. The commando had raced to the left of the open door, his back pressed into the wall, his Uzi ripped from the Velcro straps under his jacket. With a prolonged burst he cut down the three executioners instantly. There were no death-reflexes. Each skull was blown apart.
'Out!' shouted Grey, lurching to Weingrass and pulling the old man to his feet. 'To the staircase by the elevators!'
'If we're stopped,' added Ben-Ami, racing to the door, 'we're three people panicked by the gunfire.'
Out on Government Road, they rested in an alley that led to the Shaikh Hamad Boulevard, code Grey suddenly swore under his breath, more at himself than at his companions. 'Damn, damn, damn! I had to kill them!'
'You had no choice,' said the Mossad agent. 'One of their fingers on a trigger and we might all be dead, certainly one of us.'
'But with even one of them alive we could have learned so much,' countered the man from the Masada unit.
'We learned something, Tinker Bell,' said Weingrass.
'Will you stop that!'
'Actually, it's a term of affection, young man—’
'What did we learn, Manny?'
'MacDonald talked too much. In his panic the Englishman said things to people over the telephone he shouldn't have said so he had to be killed for a loose mouth.'
'How does that account for the doorman?' asked code Grey.
'Expendable. He got MacDonald's door open for the Mahdi's firing squad. Your gun made the real noise, they didn't… And now that we know about MacDonald's mouth and his execution, we can assume two vital facts—like the stress factors when you're designing an overhanging balcony on a building, one weight perched off centre on another off-centre gravity pitch.'
'What the hell are you talking about, Manny?'
'My boy, Kendrick, did a better job than he probably realizes. The Mahdi's frightened. He really doesn't know what's going on, and by killing the big mouth, now nobody can tell him. He made a mistake, isn't that something? The Mahdi made a mistake.'
'If your architectural schematics are as abstruse as you are, Mr. Weingrass,' said Grey, 'I hope none of your designs will be used for buildings in Israel.'
'Oh, the words that boy has! You sure you didn't go to the High School of Science in the Bronx? Never mind. Let's check out the scene at the Juma Mosque… Tell me, Tinker Bell, did you ever make a mistake?'
'I think I made one coming to Bahrain—’
The answer was lost on Emmanuel Weingrass. The old man was doubled over in a coughing seizure against the wall of the dark alleyway.
Stunned, Kendrick stared at the phone in his hand, then in anger slammed it down—anger and frustration and fear. You leave that royal house before morning and you are a dead man… Go quietly back to where you came from, where you belong. If he needed any final confirmation that he was closing in on the Mahdi, he had it, for all the good it did him. He was virtually a prisoner; one step outside the elegant town house and he would be shot on sight by men waiting for him to appear. Even his 'fumigated, laundered, and pressed' clothes would not be mistaken for anything but what they were: cleaned-up terrorist apparel. And the order for him to go back where he came from could hardly be taken seriously. He accepted the fact that there would be reluctance to kill an American congressman, even one whose presence in Bahrain could easily be traced to the horrors in Masqat, where he had once worked. An obliterated, bombed-out Oman as demanded by a large segment of the American people would not be in the Mahdi's interests—but neither could the Mahdi permit that congressman to return to Washington. The absence of hard evidence notwithstanding, he knew too much that others far more experienced in the black arts could put to advantage; the Mahdi's solution was all too obvious. The curious, interfering American would be one more victim of these terrible times—along with others, of course. A massacre at an airport terminal; a plane blown out of the sky; a bomb in a coffee shop—so many possibilities, as long as among those killed was a man who had learned too much.
At the end it was as he had conceived it in the beginning. Himself and the Mahdi. Himself or the Mahdi. Now he had lost, as surely as if he were in the shell of a building with a thousand tons of concrete and steel crashing down on him.
There was a sharp tapping at the door. ‘Odkluíl,' he said in Arabic, telling the visitor to come in, instinctively picking up his weapon from the white rug. The guard walked in, expertly balancing a large tray in the palm of his left hand. Evan shoved the gun under a pillow and stood up as the soldier carried his food to the white desk.
'All is in readiness, sir!' exclaimed the guard, no little triumph in his voice. 'I personally selected each item for its proper deliciousness. My wife tells me I should have been a chef rather than a warrior—’
Kendrick did not actually hear the rest of this warrior's paean to himself. Instead, he was suddenly mesmerized by the sight of the man. He was about six feet tall, give or take an inch, with respectable shoulders and an enviably trim waist. Except for that irritating waist, he was Evan's size or close to it. Kendrick glanced over at the clean, starched clothes on the chaise-lounge and then back at the colourful red and blue uniform of the frustrated chef-warrior. Without really thinking, Evan reached down for the hidden weapon as the soldier, humming like an Italian cudniere supremo, placed the steaming plates on the desk. The only thought that kept racing through Kendrick's mind was that a cleaned-up terrorist's outfit would be a target for a salvo of bullets, but not the uniform of a Bahrainian Royal Guard, especially one walking out of a royal house. Actually, there was no alternative. If he did nothing, he was dead in the morning—somewhere, somehow. He had to do something, so he did it. He walked around the outsized bed, stood behind the guard, and with all his strength smashed the handle of the gun into the soldier's bobbing, humming head.
The guard fell to the floor, unconscious, and again without really thinking, Evan sat down at the desk and ate faster than he had ever eaten in his life. Twelve minutes later, the soldier was bound and gagged on the bed as Kendrick studied himself in front of a closet mirror. The creased red and blue uniform might have been improved by the experienced fingers of a tailor, but withal and in the shadows of the evening streets, it was acceptable.
He ransacked the row of cupboards until he found a plastic shopping bag and stuffed his Masqat clothing into it. He looked at the telephone. He knew he would not use that phone, could not use it. If he survived the street outside, he would call Azra from another.
His jacket off, the shoulder holster in place, Azra angrily paced the room at the Aradous Hotel consumed by thoughts of betrayal. Where was Amal Bahrudi— the man with blue eyes who called himself Bahrudi? Was he in reality someone else, someone the foolish, bloated Englishman called 'Kendrick'? Was everything a trap, a trap to capture a member of Masqat's organization council, a trap to take the terrorist known as the Arabic Blue?… Terrorist? How typical of the Zionist killers from the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Haganah! How easily they erase the massacres of 'Jepthah' and Deir Yasin, to say nothing of their surrogate executioners at Sabra and Shatila! They steal a homeland and sell what is not theirs to sell, and kill a child for carrying the Palestinian flag—'an accident of excess', they call it—and yet we are the terrorists!… If the Aradous Hotel was a trap, he could not remain caged in the room; yet if it was not a trap, he had to be where he could be contacted. The Mahdi was everything, his summons a command, for he gave them the means for hope, for spreading their message of legitimacy. When would the world understand them? When would the Mahdis of the world be irrelevant?