"And what does it do?" I was getting ideas about the Belur Package, and why there was such interest in it.
"Well. That all depends on what the implant is programmed for." He was looking at me as though only an idiot would ask such a question. "You see, it's completely flexible. Any procedure can be programmed in, and so long as the sensors and the output signals are right you could in principle control any body function any way you like. That's just the
theory
, you understand. In practice, they're still fiddling around on the research. Maybe we'll have something really useful in five or ten years."
"What can they do with it now?"
"Oh, the easy stuff." From the look on his face, I sensed that he was at the limits of his real knowledge. "You can get an implant that controls some of the peristaltic actions in the digestive system—for people who have trouble in the small and large intestine. And of course, the heart pacemakers are a lot better now; they respond to adrenaline and hormonal levels in the blood."
He leaned forward. "Look here, old fellow, d'you mind if I ask why you're so interested in all this? I mean, it's a long way from bashing out the old Rachmaninov. What are you up to?"
I hesitated. Danger might come from unlikely places. but I just couldn't see Cyril Meecham as the instrument of evil.
"I think somebody has made implants a lot more sophisticated than any that have been done before. He was an Indian named Belur, and I'm pretty sure he made a prototype set maybe a year or two ago."
(The mental image of Dixie, garden fork deep in his chest, blood welling up over stained lower dentures. No signs of a death agony. "
Not pain. Got implant. Bloody bastard
.")
"The prototypes could be implanted to override pain signals, wherever they came from in the body. But more recently Belur made a new set of introsomatic implants, with different functions. I don't know what the newer ones do—but my brother was trying to get them from India to America when he was killed in an accident. I'm convinced that he had to leave them here, in Riyadh. And I'm trying to find out where."
"Hmm. Sorry about your brother." Now he looked intrigued, and his condolences were no more than a bow to propriety. "Haven't seen anything about these newer implants in the journals. Mind you, we're not exactly at the center of scientific action out here. I don't know how to help you. Do you have any idea at all where your brother was staying when he was here in Riyadh?"
"I don't know. If I give you a street address, is there any way that you can tell me who lives there?" I caught his look. "I don't want to go there myself, in case he shouldn't have been there—Leo was always one for the ladies."
His frown disappeared. "Aren't we all when we get half a chance?" He winked and pushed a memo pad across to me. "Jot down an address, and I'll pop over to civics and run a check for you. Push the buzzer if you want more tea."
In the minutes he was away I had time to look at my watch twenty times and to ponder again Big Brother Leo's activities. The more that I followed his tracks, the more I understood our relationship. The contrasts between my hardworking and well-planned life (concert tours fixed a year in advance) and his wild continent-hopping flights were apparent on the surface—even extreme; but underneath there were deep similarities. The difference was only this: where I dreamed and imagined, he carried thought to action.
We were identical twins, with all the genetic correspondence that implied. If I allowed my thoughts to range unfettered, and forced myself to follow after them, I would arrive close to Leo's destinations. The thoughts were easy; the hard part was to dare to act them out.
"Aren't we all when we get half a chance?"
We are, but some of us find it difficult to know a chance when it stares us in the face.
The clock on his desk ticked on. If he didn't hurry, my chances might be reduced to zero. I was at the point of leaving the office to look for him when he hurried back in. His pleasant look had been transformed to one of anger and suspicion.
"Look, I don't know what your game is here, but I want to tell you that I don't care for it."
"No game—I told you the truth. You checked that address?"
"Too bloody true I checked it. If my brother went there I think I'd disown him. That street address is the
Maison Drogue
. The man who lives there is Abdi Mansouri. He's an ex-Iranian—and he's the biggest drug dealer in the Middle East. Millions a week in illegal narcotics, and nobody willing to lift a finger against him."
He slammed the directory he was holding down on the desk. "I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt for the moment, but you'd better have an awfully good explanation—or the Embassy Police will need a few words with you."
My suspicions were turning one by one to certainties. I held up my hands to soothe Cyril Meecham. "I'll explain what's been happening—everything. But it will take a couple of minutes."
He just glared at me.
"My brother was working for the American government, as some sort of freelance agent." I spoke fast, and my mental fingers were crossed. I knew Leo, and my explanation was the only acceptable one that fitted his personality and moral code.
"He was in an undercover position, investigating organized crime in the East, and particularly the way that illegal drugs get from India to the West. He had been tracking something called Nymphs, a new drug, trying to see what route was being used for shipment—I think he realized they were coming through Riyadh."
I paused. At the mention of Nymphs, Cyril Meecham's face had turned white. He might not be a senior instrument of evil, but I would bet my Brahms that he knew more than somewhat about the use of Nymphs. Young Cyril had his own guilty secrets.
"I think my brother must have been in touch with this man, Mansouri," I went on. "And he pretended that he was in the drug business himself. He had been working with a bunch of drug dealers in England, trying to see how their operations were run. Did you ever hear of somebody called Scouse—head of an English gang who imports drugs? He's a sort of Liverpool Arab, speaks English and Arabic."
Not too surprisingly, Meecham shook his head vigorously. He didn't want that association at all.
"Never heard of him."
"He thought my brother was a dealer in Nymphs. But then they heard of something that looked like a much bigger deal. They both went after it, but my brother Leo beat Scouse's group to it. He escaped with it from India and came here. If anyone did manage to trace him, they would assume that he had brought the goods to show to Abdi Mansouri. But he didn't go to Mansouri. I confirmed that this morning. He went somewhere else, and hid the package he had with him."
While I was speaking, Meecham had been leafing through a fat binding of computer listings. He looked up at me, his face now skeptical and wary.
"I hear what you say, but I don't believe it. You said that your brother was here six months ago, right? There's no sign of any Salkind entering or leaving this country during that period."
"His name was Foss—we were raised separately. And he could have been here travelling under a false name," I added, as he looked again at the listing and shook his head.
"No Foss in here." He slammed the directory shut again. "Look, Mr. Salkind, I'm doing my best to give you the benefit of the doubt—but it's not easy. I've never heard such a bloody weird story in my life. You don't want the Science Attaché, you want the flying carpets department." His freckled face was turning redder. "As for the false name idea, we keep close tabs on all travellers with British passports travelling into and out of this country. There's no way he'd get in with a false name and a false passport, and we'd not know it and record it."
"He wouldn't be here on a British passport. I didn't mention it, but he's a naturalized American, born in England. So that list of yours—"
I paused. Cyril Meecham had sat down hard in his chair. He was glaring at me with the old reserved-for-hopeless-idiots expression.
"An American? A bloody
American
? Why the hell didn't you tell me that to start with?" His bushy eyebrows were stretching upwards towards his carroty hairline, and his voice went higher and higher. "Your brother is an American. All right. But then why waste my time with questions I can't answer?"
He stood up again.
"Mr. Salkind, you're in the wrong place. Did it never occur to you that you'll do a damned sight better to take your tale of undoubted woe to where it belongs—to the
American
bloody embassy?"
I must have sat there gaping at him for half a minute. What Cyril Meecham said was so obviously right and rational that I couldn't understand why it had to be told to me.
Imagine what I would do in Leo's place, then carry it to action
. Reasonable enough—but I had been too stupid or too exhausted to allow for undeniable real differences in our backgrounds.
On every trip to a foreign capital I made a habit of visiting the local embassy. They would give me good free advice on hotels, restaurants, and local tourist traps and rip-offs, and if I ever ran into trouble with the locals the embassy staff knew me and were ready to bail me out. Leo would probably follow my pattern abroad—but as an American citizen he would check in with the U.S. embassies.
Cyril Meecham let me use the phone before I left. The snake-eyed receptionist at the hotel confirmed that the young lady I was so interested in had not yet left her room—did I want to leave a message for her? I thought of Zan's full red lips, of her agate eyes measuring my body as I sat on the bed in Belur's house.
No thank you, no message;
definitely
no message.
But keep an eye open for her. I would call again later.
Hurry
.
I emerged from the British Embassy into the full heat of early afternoon. Even this late in the year the sun turned everything to a shimmer of baked air. The southwest part of the city had been built before the sprinklers and abundant supply of fresh water turned Riyadh to a riot of lush garden greenery. There was still dust here, dust and lung-crippling clouds of photochemical smog from cars and trucks.
My taxi driver didn't need any urging to drive fast—he wanted to find some shaded spot where the long wait for a passenger was more tolerable. We made the usual death-defying run through the network of narrow one-way streets and broad boulevards.
The American Embassy stood only a block from the old palace of Nasiriya. There was my real stamping ground, inside the palace walls where the original royal zoo had been extended to provide well-designed habitats for every beast that walked or swam the earth or ocean. The aquarium held a dozen fresh and salt water pools, hundreds of yards long, where the visitor could find everything from humpback whales to Lake Baikal seals. Lions prowled the pseudosavannah, and polar bears fished live cod from deep, icy waters. The estimates to create the new zoo ranged from hundreds of millions to billions, and its maintenance called for a permanent working staff of two hundred people.
It was a zoophile's paradise. Perhaps it said most about my lack of social graces that I had been to the Riyadh Zoo half a dozen times, but this would be my first visit to the U.S. Embassy.
Again I told the taxi driver to wait, and walked down the shaded avenue that separated zoo and embassy. A chorus of roars, barks and grunts came from the enclosures to my left; feeding time. I had the sudden heart-stopping desire to turn that way, go on through the zoo gate instead of into the embassy, back to the familiar world that I had inhabited before the accident. This wasn't me at all, running from beautiful sadists in a frantic search for who-knows-what. I was cut out for the quiet life.
**
But I'm so close, I can't stop now. Keep going.**
Whose thought was that?
I went on towards the embassy, past the lines of beggars that not even Riyadh's gigantic wealth had been able to eliminate. An honorable calling. Sightless, armless, legless, they sat head down against the walls, shaded by shrubs that grew along the tops. Two little metal bowls stood in front of each man.
I hardly glanced at them, even when one rose suddenly from almost beneath my feet and scuffled away along the street with his empty bowls tucked away under a withered left arm. That was my mistake, and I would pay for it later, but my attention was all on the moving digits of my watch.
Three o'clock. Despite my instructions to the driver to hurry, two and a half hours had now passed since I left the Intercontinental.
Time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come . . .
If I couldn't track down the Belur Package by six, I had to get back to the hotel and follow Zan and Scouse in their next move.
The embassy entrance lay a little off Beggars' Row in a narrow cul-de-sac. A blind brick wall closed off the end, with a coffee shop on the right-hand side and the big double doors of the embassy on the left. Marine guards stood just within the gates, by a huge sign in English and Arabic announcing that beyond this point lay the sovereign soil of the United States. A much smaller sign warned visitors that the embassy closed at four-thirty, and all non-U.S. nationals had to be outside by then. My time was squeezing down, tighter and tighter. And I was feeling ghastly, wondering how long I could last before I just toppled over into the dirt. I needed to get some food and drink into me.
**
Coffee. Go in there, into the shop on the right.
**
I actually took a couple of steps in that direction, then halted and stared at the bottle-green shop window. Coffee? I rubbed at my aching eyes. Nice to have some, but this was the worst time in the world to look for it. Afterwards, when I was done in the embassy—the place should still be open at four-thirty. I turned back to the embassy gates.
Some bright ideas just don't work out the way they ought to. In the next two hours I talked to fourteen embassy staff, not counting the two young Marines who started me on my rounds. Science Attaché, Commercial Attaché, Counsellor, First and Second Secretary, Military Attaché—they were all very polite and totally uncommunicative.