Authors: Robert Ludlum
“I’d kiss you right now except that you mentioned something kind of counterproductive, like ‘up to a point.’ What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that in the House I’ll vote my conscience, and if I’m challenged on the floor I’ll give my reasons as dispassionately as I can. But that’s in the House; off the Hill I’m not available for comment.”
“We get most of our PR flak off the Hill, not on it,” said the White House chief of staff reflectively. “The
Congressional Record
and cable’s C-Span cameras don’t put a dent in the
Daily News
and
Dallas
. Under the circumstances, thanks to that smooth son of a bitch Sam Winters, your offer is so irresistible I wonder what the price is. You have a price, I assume.”
“I want to know who blew the whistle on me. Who leaked the Oman story so very,
very
professionally.”
“You think
I
don’t?” erupted Dennison, bouncing forward.
“I’d have the bastards deep-sixed fifty miles off Newport News in torpedo cans!”
“Then help me find out. That’s my price, take it or take me replaying the Foxley show all over the country, calling you and your crowd exactly what I honestly think you are. A bunch of bumbling Neanderthals faced with a complicated world you can’t understand.”
“
You’re
the fucking expert?”
“Hell, no. I just know that
you’re
not. I watch and I listen and see you cutting off so many people who could help you because there’s a zig or a zag in their stripes that doesn’t conform to your preconceived pattern. And I learned something this afternoon; I saw it, heard it. The President of the United States talked to Samuel Winters, a man you disapprove of, but when you explained why you didn’t like him, that he withheld endorsements that could help you with Congress, Langford Jennings said something that impressed the hell out of me. He said to you that if this Sam Winters disagreed with some policy or other, it did
not
make him an
enemy
.”
“The President frequently doesn’t understand who his enemies are. He spots ideological allies quickly and sticks by them—sometimes too long, frankly—but often he’s too generous to detect those who would erode what he stands for.”
“That’s about the weakest and most presumptuous argument I’ve ever heard,
Herbie
. What are you shielding your man from? Diverse opinions?”
“Let’s go back to your big surprise, Congressman. I like the topic better.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“What do you know that we don’t that can help us find out who leaked the Oman story?”
“Essentially what I learned from Frank Swann. As head of the OHIO-Four-Zero unit, he was the liaison to the secretaries of Defense and State as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, all of whom knew about me. He told me to rule them out as possible leaks, however—”
“
Far
out,” interrupted Dennison. “They’ve got soft-boiled eggs all over their faces. They can’t answer the simplest questions, which makes them look like prime idiots. Incidentally, they’re not idiots and they’ve been around long enough to know what maximum-classified is and why it’s there. What else?”
“Then outside of you—and frankly I rule you out only because my surfacing is about as ‘counterproductive’ as your fractured
gray cells could conjure—that leaves three other people.”
“Who are they?”
“The first is a man named Lester Crawford at the Central Intelligence Agency; the second, the station chief in Bahrain, James Grayson. The last is a woman, Adrienne Rashad, who’s apparently special property and operates out of Cairo.”
“What about them?”
“According to Swann, they’re the only ones who knew my identity when I was flown over to Masqat.”
“That’s
our
personnel,” said Dennison pointedly. “What about your people over there?”
“I can’t say it’s impossible, but I think it’s remote. The few I reached, except for the young sultan, are so removed from any contact with Washington that I’d have to consider them last, if at all. Ahmat, whom I’ve known for years, certainly wouldn’t for a lot of reasons, starting with his throne and, equally important, his ties with this government. Of the four men I spoke to on the telephone, only one responded and he was killed for it—undoubtedly with the consent of the others. They were frightened out of their skins. They didn’t want anything to do with me, no acknowledgment of my presence in Oman whatsoever, and that included anyone they knew who did meet with me and who might make them suspect. You’d have to have been there to understand. They all live with the terrorist syndrome, with daggers at their throats—and at the throat of every member of their families. There’d been reprisals, a son killed, a daughter raped and disfigured because cousins or uncles called for action against the Palestinians. I don’t believe any of those men would have spoken my name to a deaf dog.”
“
Christ
, what kind of a world do those goddamned Arabs live in?”
“One in which the vast majority try to survive and make lives for themselves and their children. And we haven’t helped, you bigoted bastard.”
Dennison cocked his head and frowned. “I may have deserved that shot, Congressman, I’ll have to think about it. Not so long ago it was fashionable not to like Jews, not to trust them, and now that’s changed and the Arabs have taken their place in the scheme of our dislikes. Maybe it’s
all
bullshit, who knows?… But what I want to know now is who sprung you out of the top-secret woodwork. You figure it’s someone from our ranks.”
“It has to be. Swann was approached—fraudulently approached, as it turns out—by a blond-haired man with a European
accent who had in-depth data on me. That information could only have come from government files—my congressional background check probably. He tried to tie me in with the Oman situation, but Swann firmly denied it, saying he had specifically turned me down. However, Frank had the impression that the man wasn’t convinced.”
“We know about the blond spook,” broke in Dennison. “We can’t find him.”
“But he dug and found someone else, someone who confirmed either intentionally or unintentionally what he was tracking down. If we rule you out, and if we also rule out State, Defense and the Joint Chiefs, it has to be Crawford, Grayson or the Rashad woman.”
“Cross out the first two,” said the White House chief of staff. “Early this morning I grilled Crawford right here in this office, and he was ready to challenge me to a game of Saigon roulette for even suggesting the possibility. As far as Grayson is concerned, I reached him in Bahrain five hours ago and he damned near had apoplexy thinking we even
considered
him the leak. He read the black-operations book to me as if I were the dumbest kid on the block who should be thrown into solitary for calling him on an unsecured line in foreign territory. Like Crawford, Grayson’s an old-line professional. Neither one would risk throwing away his life’s work over you, and neither could be tricked into doing it.”
Kendrick leaned forward in Dennison’s chair, his elbows on the desk. He stared at the far wall of the office, conflicting thoughts racing through his mind. Khalehla, born Adrienne Rashad, had saved his life, but had she saved it only to sell him? She was also a close friend of Ahmat, who could be damaged by his association with her, and Evan had hurt the young sultan enough without adding a turned intelligence agent to the list. Yet Khalehla had understood him when he needed understanding; she was kind when he needed kindness because he was so afraid—both for his life and for his inadequacies. If she had been tricked into revealing him and he exposed her ineptness, she was finished in a job she intensely believed in.… Yet if she had not been tricked, if for reasons of her own she had exposed him—then all
he
would expose was her betrayal. Which was the truth? Dupe or liar? Whichever it was, he had to find out for himself without the specter of official scrutiny. Above all, dupe or liar, he had to know
whom
she had reached or
who
had reached her. For only the “who” could answer the “why” he had been exposed
as Evan of Oman. And that he had to learn! “Then out of the seven of you, there’s only one unaccounted for.”
“The woman,” agreed Dennison, nodding his head. “I’ll put her on a revolving spit over the hottest goddamn fire you ever saw.”
“No, you won’t,” countered Kendrick. “You and your people won’t get near her until I give you the word—if I give it. And we’re going to go one step further. No one’s to know you’re flying her back here—under cover, I think is the term. Absolutely
no one
. Is that understood?”
“Who the hell are
you
—”
“We’ve been through this, Herbie. Remember next Tuesday in the Blue Room? With the Marine Band and all those reporters and television cameras? I’ll have a great big platform to climb on if I want to and express a few opinions. Believe me, you’ll be among the first targets, decked ass and all.”
“
Shit!
May the one being blackmailed be so bold as to ask why this female spook gets preferred treatment?”
“Sure,” replied Evan, his gaze settled on the chief of staff. “That woman saved my life and you’re not going to ruin hers by letting her own people know you’ve got her under your well-advertised White House shotgun. You’ve done enough of that around here.”
“All right, all right! But let’s get one thing clear. If she’s the sieve, you turn her over to me.”
“That’ll depend,” said Kendrick, sitting back.
“On
what
, for Christ’s sake?”
“On the how and the why.”
“More riddles, Congressman?”
“Not for me,” answered Evan, suddenly rising from the chair. “Get me out of here, Dennison. Also, since I can’t go home, either to my house in Virginia or even out to Colorado, without being swamped, can someone in this booby hatch rent me a lodge or a cabin in the country under another name? I’ll pay for a month or whatever’s necessary. I just want a few days to figure things out before I go back to the office.”
“It’s been taken care of,” said the chief of staff abruptly. “Actually, it was Jennings’s idea—to put you on ice over the weekend in one of those sterile houses in Maryland.”
“What the hell is a sterile house? Please use language I can understand.”
“Let’s put it this way. You’re the guest of the President of the United States in a place no one can find that is reserved for
people we don’t want found. It dovetailed with my considered opinion that Langford Jennings should make the first public statements about you. You’ve been seen here, and as sure as rabbits have little rabbits the word’ll get out.”
“You’re the scenario writer. What do we say—what do
you
say, since I’m in isolation?”
“That’s easy. Your safety. It’s the President’s primary concern after conferring with our counterterrorist experts. Don’t worry, our writers will come up with something that’ll make the women cry into their handkerchiefs and the men want to go out and march in a parade. And since Jennings has the last word in these things, it’ll probably include some whacked-up image of a powerful knight of the Round Table looking after a brave younger brother who carried out a joint dangerous mission.
Shit!
”
“And if there’s any truth to the reprisal theory,” added Kendrick, “it’ll make me a target.”
“That’d be nice,” agreed Dennison, nodding again.
“Call me when you’ve made arrangements for the Rashad woman.”
Evan sat in the leather lounge chair in the study of the impressive sterile house on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the township of Cynwid Hollow. Outside, within the walls of the floodlit grounds, guards moved in and out of the lights as they patrolled every foot of the acreage, their rifles at the ready, their eyes alert.
Kendrick snapped off the third replay he had watched on television of President Langford Jennings’s suddenly called press conference regarding one Congressman Evan Kendrick of Colorado. It was more outrageous than Dennison had projected, filled with gut-wrenching pauses accompanied by a constant series of well-rehearsed grins that so obviously conveyed the pride and the agony beneath the surface of the man smiling. The President once again said everything in general terms and nothing specific—except in one area:
Until all proper security measures are in place, I have asked Congressman Kendrick, a man we are all so proud of, to remain in protective seclusion. And with this request, I hereby give dire warning. Should cowardly terrorists anywhere make any attempt on the life of my good friend, my close colleague, someone I look upon no less than I would a younger brother, the full might of the United States will be employed by ground, sea and air against determined enclaves of those responsible
. Determined? Oh, my God!
A telephone rang. Evan looked around trying to find out where it was. It was across the room on a desk; he swung his legs off the lounger and walked to the startlingly intrusive instrument.
“Yes?”
“She’s flying over on military transport with a senior attaché from the embassy in Cairo. She’s listed as a secretarial aide, the name’s unimportant. The ETA is seven o’clock in the morning our time. She’ll be in Maryland by ten at the latest.”
“What does she know?”
“Nothing.”
“You had to say something,” insisted Kendrick.
“She was told it was new and urgent instructions from her government, instructions that could be transmitted only in person over here.”
“She bought that nonsense?”
“She didn’t have a choice. She was picked up at her flat in Cairo and has been in protective custody ever since. Have a lousy night, you bastard.”
“Thanks, Herbie.” Evan hung up the phone, both relieved and frightened by the prospect of tomorrow morning’s confrontation with the woman he had known as Khalehla, a woman he had made love to in a frenzy of fear and exhaustion. That impulsive act and the desperation that led to it had to be forgotten. He had to determine whether he was re-meeting an enemy or a friend. Regardless, there was now a schedule, at least for the next twelve or fifteen hours. It was time to call Ann O’Reilly and, through her, reach Manny. It did not matter who knew where he was; he was the official guest of the President of the United States.