The Icarus Agenda

by Ludlum, Robert

  What time was it? He turned his wrist and—his watch was not there. Goddamn it, the bitch still had it! He rolled over on the bed and swung his legs out on the floor without regard for the sheet covering him. The soles of his feet landed on hard objects; he looked down at the polar-bear white rug and blinked again. Everything that had been in his pockets was there—everything but the pack of cigarettes which he very much wanted at the moment. And then his eyes were drawn to a gold-bordered page of notepaper on the bedside table; he picked it up.

  I think we were both kind to each other when each of us needed some kindness. No regrets other than one. I won't see you again. Goodbye.

  No name, no forwarding address, just Ciao, amico. So much for two passing ships in the Persian Gulf or two uptight, damaged people on a late afternoon in Bahrain. But it was not afternoon any longer, he realized. He was barely able to read Khalehla's note; only the last orange sprays of sundown now streamed through the windows. He reached for his watch; it was seven-fifty-five; he had slept nearly four hours. He was famished, and his years in the deserts, the mountains and the white water had taught him not to travel hard on an empty stomach. A 'guard', she had said. 'Outside,' she had explained. Evan yanked the sheet off the bed, wrapped it around himself and walked across the room. He stopped; on the floor was an envelope. That was the sound he had heard, an envelope shoved under a door, forced under, sliding back and forth because of the thick rug. He picked it up, tore it open and read it. A list of sixteen names, addresses and telephone numbers. MacDonald! The roster of calls he had made in Bahrain. One step closer to the Mahdi!

  Evan opened the door; the greetings between himself and the uniformed guard were dispensed with rapidly in Arabic. 'You are awake now, sir. You were not to be disturbed until eight-thirty o'clock.'

  'I'd be most grateful if you would disturb me now with some food. The woman said I might get something to eat from your kitchen.'

  'Indeed, whatever you wish, sir.'

  'Whatever you can find. Meat, rice, bread… and milk, I'd like some milk. Everything as soon as possible, please.'

  'Very quick, sir!' The guard turned and rushed down the hallway towards the staircase. Evan closed the door and stood for a moment finding his bearings in the now darkened room. He switched on a lamp at the edge of the endless bureau, then started across the thick-piled rug to another door that led to one of the most opulent bathrooms in Bahrain.

  Ten minutes later he emerged, showered and shaved, now dressed in a short terrycloth robe. He walked to the cupboard where Khalehla had said his clothes were—'fumigated, laundered and pressed'. He opened the mirrored door and barely recognized the odd assortment of apparel he had collected at the embassy in Masqat; it looked like a respectable paramilitary uniform. Leaving everything on hangers he draped the starched outfit over the chaise-lounge, walked back to the bed and sat down, gazing at his belongings on the floor. He was tempted to check his money belt to see if any of the large bills were missing, then decided against it. If Khalehla was a thief, he did not want to know it, not at the moment.

  The telephone rang, its harsh bell less a ring than a prolonged metallic shriek. For a moment he stared at the instrument wondering… who? He had MacDonald's list; that was the only call Khalehla said he could expect. Khalehla? Had she changed her mind? With a rush of unanticipated feeling he reached for the phone, yanking it to his ear. Eight seconds later he wished to God he had not.

  'Amreekánee,' said the male voice, its flat monotone conveying hatred. 'You leave that royal house before morning and you are a dead man. Tomorrow you go quietly back to where you came from, where you belong.'

  The Icarus Agenda

  Chapter 14

  Emmanuel Weingrass pulled code Grey's radio to his lips and spoke. 'Go ahead and remember to keep the line open. I've got to hear everything!’

  'If you'll forgive me, Weingrass,' replied Ben-Ami from the shadows across Government Road. 'I would feel somewhat more secure if our colleague Grey also heard. You and I are not so adept in these situations as those young men.'

  'They haven't a brain in their collective head. We have two.'

  'This is not shul, Emmanuel, this is what's called the field and it can be very unpleasant.'

  'I have every confidence in you, Benny boy, so long as you guarantee these kiddie radios can be heard through steel.'

  'They're as clear as any electronic bug ever developed, with the added function of direct transmission. One just pushes the right buttons.'

  'One doesn't,' said Weingrass, 'you do. Go on, we'll follow when we hear what this MacDonald-Strickland says.'

  'Send code Grey first, please.' Out of the shadows near the marquee of the Tylos Hotel, Ben-Ami joined the bustling crowds around the entrance. People came and went, mostly male, mostly in Western dress, along with a smattering of women exclusively in Western dress. Taxis disgorged passengers, as others filled them, tipping a harried doorman whose sole job was to open and close doors, and every now and then to blow a strident whistle for a lowly, thobed bellhop to carry luggage. Ben-Ami melted into this melee and went inside. Moments later, through the background noise of the lobby, he could be heard dialling; squinting in irritation, Manny held up the radio between himself and the much taller, muscular code Grey. The first words from Room 202 were obscured; then the Mossad agent spoke.

  'Shaikh Strickland?'

  'Who's this?' The Englishman's cautious whisper was now distinct; Ben-Ami had adjusted the radio.

  'I'm downstairs… Anah henah littee gáhrah—'

  'Bloody damn black fool!' cried MacDonald. 'I don't speak that gibberish! Why are you calling from the lobby?'

  'I was testing you, Mr. Strickland,' Ben-Ami broke in quickly. 'A man under stress often gives himself away. You might have asked me where my business trip was taking me, perhaps leading to a subsequent code. Then I would have known you were not the man—'

  'Yes, yes, I understand! Thank Christ you're here! It's taken you long enough. I expected you a half-hour ago. You were to say something to me. Say it!'

  'Not over the telephone,' answered the Mossad infiltrator firmly. 'Never over the telephone, you should know that.'

  'If you think I'm just going to let you into my room—'

  'I wouldn't if I were you,' interrupted Ben-Ami once again. 'We know you're armed.'

  'You do?'

  'Every weapon sold under a counter is known to us.'

  'Yes… yes, of course.'

  'Open your door with the latch on. If my words are incorrect, kill me.'

  'Yes… very well. I'm sure it won't be necessary. But understand me, whoever you are, one misplaced syllable and you're a corpse!'

  ' I shall practise my English, Shaikh Strickland.'

  A tiny green light suddenly began blinking on the small radio in Weingrass's hand. 'What the hell is that?' asked Manny.

  'Direct transmission,' replied code Grey. 'Give it to me.' The Masada commando took the instrument and pressed a button. 'Go ahead.'

  'He's alone!' said Ben-Ami's voice. 'We have to move quickly, take him now!'

  'We don't make any moves, you Mossad imbecile!' countered Weingrass, grabbing the radio. 'Even those mutants from the State Department's Consular Operations can hear what they've just been told, but not the holy Mossad! They hear only their own voices, and maybe Abraham's if he's got a code ring out of a box of corn flakes!'

  'Manny, I don't need this,' said Ben-Ami slowly, painfully over the radio.

  'You need ears, that's what you need, ganza macher! That daffodil expects a contact from the Mahdi any minute—someone who's not to call from the lobby but who's to go directly to his room. He's got the words to get MacDonald to open the door, that's when we join the party and take them both! What did you have in mind? Breaking the door down courtesy of the Neanderthal here beside me?'

  'Well, yes—’

  'I don't need this, either,' muttered Grey quietly.

  'No wonder you idiots blew it in Washington. You thought
Password was a Mossad drop and not a television show!'

  'Manny!'

  'Get your secret ass up to the second floor! We'll be there in two minutes, right, Tinker Bell?'

  'Mr. Weingrass,' said code Grey, the muscles of his lean, muscular jaw working furiously as he snapped off the radio. 'You are probably the most irritatingly vexatious man I have ever met.'

  'Oy, such words! In the Bronx you would have been beaten up for that—if ten or twelve of my Irish or Italian buddies could have handled you. Come on!' Manny started across Government Road, followed by Grey, who kept shaking his head, not in disagreement but only to purge the thoughts he was thinking.

  The hotel corridor was long, the carpet worn. It was the dinner hour and most of the guests were out. Weingrass stood at one end; he had tried to smoke a Gauloise but had crushed it out, burning a hole in the carpet, as it had started a devastating rumble in his chest. Ben-Ami was by the farthest elevator, the ever-present, irritated hotel guest waiting for a conveyance that never came. Code Grey was nearest to Room 202, leaning casually against the wall next to a door fifteen feet diagonally across the hall from 'Mr. Strickland's'. He was a professional; he assumed the posture of a young man eagerly awaiting a woman he was perhaps not meant to meet, even to the point of seeming to talk through the door.

  It happened, and Weingrass was impressed. The uniformed doorman from the Tylos's marqueed entrance suddenly walked out of an elevator, his gold-braided cap in his hand; he approached Room 202. He stopped, knocked, waited for the chained door to be partially opened and spoke. The chain was unlatched. Suddenly, with the aggressive speed and purpose of an Olympic athlete, code Grey spun away from the wall, hurling himself at the two figures in the doorway, somehow managing to withdraw a handgun from some unseen place as he crashed his body, surging up laterally into his two enemies, his feet and arms, again somehow, pulling them together as one entity and sending them across the floor. Two muted shots erupted from the commando's pistol; the automatic in Anthony MacDonald's hand was blown away, as were two of his fingers.

  Weingrass and Ben-Ami converged on the door and rushed inside, slamming it shut behind them.

  'My God, look at me!' screamed the Englishman on the floor, grabbing his bleeding right hand. 'Jesus Christ! I have no—'

  'Get a towel from the bathroom,' ordered Grey 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 Grey, grabbing the towel and throwing it aside.

  'You told me to get it,' protested Ben-Ami, confused.

  'I've changed my mind,' said Grey, 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 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 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 a
bsence 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.