Authors: Robert Ludlum
“Get a towel from the bathroom,” ordered Gray calmly, addressing Ben-Ami. The Mossad agent did as he was told by the younger man.
“I am only a
messenger
!” yelled the doorman, writhing next to the bed in fear. “I was only to deliver a message!”
“The
hell
you’re a messenger,” said Emmanuel Weingrass, standing over the man. “You’re perfect, you son of a bitch. You see who comes, who goes—you’re their goddamned
eyes
. Oh, I want to
talk
to you.”
“I have no
hand
!” shrieked the obese MacDonald, the blood rolling in tiny rivers down his arm.
“Here!” said Ben-Ami, kneeling down and wrapping a towel around the Englishman’s blown-apart fingers.
“Don’t do that,” ordered code Gray, grabbing the towel and throwing it aside.
“You told me to get it,” protested Ben-Ami, confused.
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Gray, his voice suddenly cold,
holding MacDonald’s arm down, the blood now rushing out of his two stumped fingers. “
Blood
,” continued the Masada commando, speaking calmly to the Englishman, “especially blood from the right arm—from the
aorta
expelling it from the heart—will have nowhere else to go but on this floor. Do you read me,
khanzeer
? Do you understand me,
pig
? Tell us what we must know or be drained of life. Where is this Mahdi? Who is he?”
“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 they were no competition for the lethal code Gray 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 Gray, 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, as they rested in an alley that led to the Shaikh Hamad Boulevard, code Gray 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 Gray.
“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 center on another off-center 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 Gray, “I hope none of your designs will follow 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 increasingly 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. “
Odkhul
,” 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 and then back at the colorful 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
cuciniere 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 closets 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 “Jephthah” 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?
The telephone rang and Azra raced to it. “
Yes?
”
“I was delayed but I’m on my way. They found me; I was nearly killed at the airport but I escaped. They may even have traced
you
by now.”
“
What?
”
“Leaks in the system. Get out, but don’t go through the lobby. There’s a staircase designed for a fire exit. It’s at the south end of the hallway, I think. North or south, one or the other. Use it and go through the restaurant’s kitchen to the employees’ exit. You’ll come out on the Wadi Al Ahd. Walk across the road; I’ll pick you up.”
“You
are
you, Amal Bahrudi? I can trust you?”
“Neither one of us has a choice, do we?”
“That is not an answer.”
“I’m not your enemy,” lied Evan Kendrick. “We’ll never be friends but I’m not your enemy. I can’t afford it. And you’re wasting time, poet, part of which is mine. I’ll be there in five minutes. Hurry!”
“I go.”
“Be careful.”
Azra hung up the phone and went to his weapons, which he had cleaned repeatedly and placed in a neat row on the bureau. He took the small Heckler and Koch P9S automatic, knelt down, pulling up his left trouser leg, and inserted the weapon in the crisscrossing calf straps that rested below the back of his knee. Standing up he removed the larger, more powerful Mauser Parabellum pistol and shoved it into his shoulder holster, this followed by the sheathed hunting knife resting alongside the gun. He walked to a chair where he had thrown the coat of his newly purchased suit, put on the jacket and crossed to the door, rapidly letting himself out into the corridor.
Nothing would have seemed odd to him were it not for his concentration on the whereabouts of the staircase and his desire to save time—time now measured in minutes and segments of minutes. He started to his right, to the south end of the hallway, his eyes only partially aware of a door being closed, not an open door but one barely ajar. Meaningless: a careless guest; a Western woman carrying too many shopping boxes. Then, unable to see an exit sign for a staircase, he turned quickly to check the other end, the north end of the hallway. A second door, this one open no more than two inches, was closed swiftly, silently. The first was now no longer meaningless, for surely the second was not. They had found him! His room was being watched. By
whom
? Who were
they
? Azra continued walking, now to the north end of the corridor, but the instant he passed the second door he pivoted against the wall, reached inside his jacket for the long-bladed hunting knife, and waited. In seconds the door opened; he spun around the frame, instantly facing a man he
knew was his enemy, a deeply tanned, muscular man near his own age—desert training was written all over him, an Israeli
commando
! Instead of a weapon the startled Jew held a radio in his hand; he was unarmed!
Azra thrust the knife directly forward toward the Israeli’s throat. In a lightning move the blade was deflected; the terrorist then arced it down, slicing into the Hebrew’s wrist; the radio fell to the carpeted floor as Azra kicked the door shut; the automatic lock clicked.
Gripping his wrist, the Israeli lashed out his right foot, expertly catching the Palestinian’s left kneecap. Azra stumbled; another steel toe caught him in the side of his neck, then still another crashed into his ribs. But the angle was right; the Israeli was off-balance! The terrorist lunged, the knife an extension of his arm as he sent it directly into the commando’s stomach. Blood erupted, covering Azra’s face, as the Israeli, code name Orange of the Masada Brigade, fell back on the floor.