by Ian Barclay
“I got everything she knows, all on a minor level,” Alain told him. “She didn’t know an Israeli agent was involved. She thought he was an American. I don’t think we should kill her—she won’t remember what it is she’s told me and she didn’t deliberately order the death of a Mossad operative.”
Luc shook his head grimly. “Nabel said over the phone that Gottlieb was a friend of his. Nabel used to go to his kibbutz and plant lettuce with him or something. Nabel said she was to die. You want me—”
Alain said sharply, “Wait a few minutes and then come down.”
He left the tiny room, went down the back stairs and used Michelle’s key to unlock her door. She was sitting up on the bed, wiping her eyes and shaking her head sleepily. “Oh, there you are.” She was still smiling.
He put her out again with more nitrous oxide. Then he went to the bathroom, dropped the aerosol can in his shaving kit on the handbasin, and removed from it a hypodermic syringe and an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid. He pulled the plastic protective cap off the hypodermic needle, pushed the plunger all the way home, and pressed the needle through the rubber top of the bottle. He inverted the bottle and, keeping the needle tip below the liquid level, pulled the plunger slowly out, filling the syringe with the clear liquid. He drew out the needle from the rubber cap, replaced the bottle in the kit, walked back to the bed, and held Michelle’s bare right arm immediately below the elbow with his left hand. The inside of her arm faced him, and he squeezed with his thumb across it to block the flow and make the blood vessels stand out. He glanced at her face. Her eyes were half closed and she still had a goofy smile. He picked a long blue vein running just beneath the skin in the middle of her arm and he eased the needle into it. He released his grip beneath her elbow and pulled back a tiny bit on the plunger until he saw a spurt of blood enter the clear liquid inside the syringe, showing that the needle was properly inserted in the vein. He looked once more at her face, then slowly drove the plunger home, saying softly, “It won’t hurt a bit. It’s Nembutal. I once had to do this with my mother’s dog.”
The smile never left her face.
When a gentle rap sounded on the door and a voice said, “It’s Luc,” he let him in. Alain went to pack his shaving kit in his knapsack.
Luc closed the door behind him and dropped his own knapsack on the floor. “Ready to go?”
“Sure.”
“You got laid?”
Alain shook his head.
“I thought you might have because of the smile she has on her face. At least you got a shower out of it.” Luc walked over to Michelle’s body on the bed and raised one of her eyelids with his thumb. The pupil did not contract from the light.
“Are you checking up on me?” Alain asked.
Luc didn’t answer, just let the eyelid drop back in place and gazed coolly at Alain from his own calm blue eyes behind his tinted spectacles.
They shouldered their knapsacks, went down the back stairs, and out into the town. No one paid attention to the two foreign hikers crazy enough to walk places in the morning sun. They climbed back into the hills behind the town. At a lonely stretch of empty desert, they plodded through hot stones and baked mud to cross over the invisible border into Israel.
In the morning, Richard Dartley hired a felucca on the Nile. He and Nina went out on the water as the sun’s heat grew, after they had visited a suq in the cooler early morning. Nina was curious about Dartley’s purchase at the suq, but she said nothing. The boatman was a wiry, shriveled man with leathery skin, and Nina had bargained with him intensely before they got into the craft, south of the Kasr-el-Nil Bridge on the East Bank. There was a lively river breeze upstream and they sailed with it past Roda Island, which had at its southern tip the Nilometer, a marked column which was once used to measure the height of the river at certain times in order to forecast how well crops would do, since all agriculture depended on plentiful Nile water.
The pyramids were to their right as they sailed upriver, relaxing in the roomy felucca with its large, more or less triangular sail which the boatman handled effortlessly. When they came to a reach of the eastern bank which was empty of people, Dartley announced that he wanted to go ashore.
The boatman waited in the craft after he had beached it on the riverbank, while Nina and Dartley walked hand in hand—boatmen were used to such ungodly intimacies in public on the part of tourists—along the bank until they were hidden from his sight by bushes.
Nina laughed and said, “He probably thinks you got horny and we stopped for a quick fuck.” She looked him in the eyes, hopefully. “Did we?”
Dartley smiled and unwrapped his purchase from the suq. “First things first.” He produced a dozen cheap metal tableforks of various design and size. He said, “I need to practice.”
He threw a fork hard at a mudbank about fifteen feet away. The kitchen utensil turned end over end and buried its tines into the mud with a loud splat.
“Very good,” Nina said in a patronizing voice. “This must make quite a change from a Browning Hi-Power.”
“You just try bringing a Browning into the presidential palace.”
“Don’t you think they’ll ask why you’re bringing in a dozen forks?”
“Stop giving me a hard time, Nina.”
He buried four forks, tines first, into the mudbank in quick succession, followed by a fifth which hit sideways and fell to the ground.
Nina giggled. “I was just thinking, if that happens with Ahmed Hasan, he’ll probably never guess you’re trying to kill. He’ll think you’re mad because you don’t like his food.”
Dartley tried to keep a straight face and buried the remainder of the forks with deadly accuracy and force into the mudbank.
“How do you know Ahmed Hasan is going to feed these Americans at his reception?” Nina asked.
“Because he’s already told them he’s not giving them booze. He has to lay something out for them.”
“Maybe he’ll expect them to eat with their fingers,” she suggested.
“Then I’ll strangle him.”
She watched him practice with the differently sized and shaped forks. His speed in handling them increased, and the force with which they now hit the mudbank buried them halfway up their handles into the soft river muck. Nina tried her hand at throwing some, claiming before she did so that it was easy. She never managed to stick a single fork.
“One more question,” she said in a while, “and this is a serious one. I know this is not a suicide mission, but I don’t see how you can do this at a crowded reception and expect to escape unseen. How?”
Dartley paused with six or seven of the forks in his hands, and he half turned to her and looked in her direction as the forks shot from his right hand, one after another. They buried themselves in the target area of the mudbank while Dartley himself was facing nearly in the opposite direction.
“I’m beginning to get the idea,” Nina said, impressed.
“Maybe it’ll work,” Dartley said. “It’s worth a try. Meanwhile we don’t want to disappoint our boatman. How about that quick fuck?”
The American amateur archeologists were sitting in the well-tended gardens of the Sheraton when Richard Dartley arrived. Dartley registered many of them as dotty, harmless types, along with some earnest academics. A few looked like lost souls who might have come on the wrong tour. And then there was Emily and Harry, who kind of stuck out from the others because of their wheeler-dealer attitude. Also, they were drunk again.
“Hey”—Harry couldn’t remember the name Dartley had given the previous night—“good to see you.”
“Terry,” Dartley said shaking Harry’s hand. “Hi, Emily.” He pecked her on the cheek.
This was all Emily needed to launch into an account of how Terry had saved them from the “mugger.” Her current version of the happenings did not include Harry’s pissing against the mosque, and Harry didn’t interrupt to volunteer anything about this himself. It was a clear case now of robbery being th
e motive.
Dartley had other things on his mind than discussing this story, but he went out of his way to be charming to several old dears who might come in handy later when he might need to chat with them if they happened to be standing near Ahmed Hasan. The floor plan had not been of much use to him, except to get a general idea of the layout of the palace. No one had any idea in what part of the presidential palace the reception would be held or even whether it would be held indoors or outdoors. In fact, there was no advance information that the reception would definitely take place at the presidential palace. Dartley no longer cared where they held the damn thing so long as it took place, so long as there was food, and so long as they were not expected to eat with their fingers.
Emily was launched into an account of Isis and Osiris, and it seemed from her version of their lives, the mullahs would not have approved of them. Osiris, as the eldest brother, became ruler. He chose his sister Isis as queen, which seemed to cause problems in the rest of the family. Another sister, married to another brother, got Osiris drunk so they could hit the sack together. This other brother, Set, persuaded Osiris at a banquet—he must have been drunk again—to lie down in a box. Set nailed the lid shut, dumped the box in the Nile and became ruler himself. When the box was washed up, the widow Isis recovered the body—but Set seized it and cut it in fourteen pieces, which he widely scattered. Isis found all these pieces, except for the phallus, which was eaten by a Nile river crab (Harry supplied this information). She joined the body together and managed to conceive a son with it—Dartley didn’t ask Emily the obvious question about the piece of property the crab had run off with. Anyway, this son set out to avenge his father’s murder by Set, and when his mother Isis tried to stop him, he cut off her head which she replaced with the head of a cow, and so on.…
After Harry and Emily had consumed about another pint of alcohol each, three air-conditioned charter buses arrived to pick the guests up. No invitations had been handed out and now no identities were checked, which suited Dartley fine. As Harry put it, they were off to the palace to meet the prez.
The thing Harry didn’t know was that Dartley hoped to make it an unforgettable occasion.
Dartley spotted the metal detectors as they were ushered through a long hallway in the presidential palace. Everyone had to pass through in succession, but they were artfully concealed as decorative arches. Their courteous operators, posing as welcomers, greeted people with smiles, but at the same time blocked enough of the passageway so that the new-comers had to pass through each detector in single file. There were more than a hundred Americans in all.
The detectors did not sound any alarms while those with Dartley went through. Dartley admired the smooth, ultra-professional way the palace security men had set up this electronic search—probably most of the amateur archeologists were unaware they had passed through one metal detector, let alone three. Dartley hoped that the rest of the palace security was a bit looser. If not, he was in trouble.
Like the old central part of the Marriott Hotel, the presidential palace looked like it had once been a royal residence. They trooped through enormous chambers and past ornate staircases and balconies. Dartley reflected on the fact that once rebels seized power in the name of the people, the first thing they always did was move into the luxury quarters of the tyrants they had deposed. The Bolsheviks did it in Moscow and St. Petersburg. When the French mob stormed the Bastille prison, they knew enough to totally destroy it—so that the Place de la Bastille today was just a big space with little cars whirring about it at high speed. However, Mitterand, the present left-wing socialist premier of France, lives like a king under a blaze of chandeliers.
Ahmed Hasan had found the tools of repression in place—even if not in use—when he seized power. It just came naturally to him to put the dungeons of the thick-walled medieval fortress of the Citadel back to work, and to live in splendor like a great potentate in this palace himself. He probably felt it was the least his grateful countrymen could do for him.
Only after Dartley had been abroad many times had he come to appreciate the lack of palaces and so forth in America. In America, so long as men were free to bear arms, they need never bow to some upstart autocrat. And as Dartley’s uncle liked to say, the day Soviet paratroopers hit American soil, they’d be cut to pieces by the members of the National Rifle Association before the army could get to them.
They entered a big ceremonial hall and milled about for a while. Dartley slipped away from Emily and Harry because they were loud and attracting attention, which was the last thing Dartley wanted to bring on himself.
In order to remain inconspicuous, he got into conversation with a little old lady, a retired pharmacist from Cincinnati, and was genuinely interested in her talk of how the ancient Egyptians held certain animals sacred, among them the crocodile. She told him that crocodile cemeteries had been discovered in which the reptiles were mummified and buried with their newly hatched or even with their eggs. She said that when Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, one particular crocodile god at a place called Crocodilopolis—she swore she was not putting him on—became a big attraction for Roman tourists. Each worshipper brought an offering of meat, bread and wine. The big old croc sunned himself on the bank of his private lake, with gold rings in his ears (Dartley was fairly sure crocodiles didn’t have earlobes, but he wasn’t about to spoil her story by mentioning that) and gold bracelets on his forelegs. One priest held open his jaws and another threw the meat and bread and poured the wine into his maw.
While the little old lady from Cincinnati was telling Dartley about crocodiles, he was searching the room with his eyes for signs of dangerous human reptiles. Apart from a few low-level Egyptian functionaries, there was no one apart from Americans in the big hall. Why had Hasan brought them here? Dartley had no answer to that, and he would not have been surprised at that moment to see soldiers at one end of the hall mounting machine guns on tripods….
A group of Egyptians arrived—uniformed military officers and men in pinstripe suits who Dartley could tell from their smooth smiles and polished manner were career diplomats. Coffee and tea were served and the chatter started up afresh. No sign of Ahmed Hasan yet. No doubt he would make a grand entrance later.
Dartley felt eyes on him. Yet when he turned around, no one in particular struck him as a threat. But he knew he was being watched. His sixth sense. Someone.
Then Dartley caught sight of him. The small, thin physicist he had trapped in the cafe near the Citadel, who had told him that Ahmed was using plutonium for his bomb. Bakkush. Yes, Dr. Mustafa Bakkush.
The Egyptian looked furtively at him and sidled away into the crowd.
Dartley went after him but couldn’t find him in the mob of archeologists, civil servants, military officers and waiters rushing everywhere with trays of tea and coffee. Had he gone to sound the alarm? Probably not. Dartley knew Bakkush had been watching him for a while. If he was going to turn him in, he wouldn’t have waited around to be discovered. Dartley cursed himself for his own carelessness in not spotting Bakkush sooner. He had been on the watch for palace security men and for Ahmed’s bodyguards, not inoffensive, pint-sized scientists. And judging by the scared look on Bakkush’s face, he had not expected to come across Dartley here either!
Without bringing attention to himself by moving too fast among the throng, Dartley floated about with a vague, benevolent smile on his face while he scanned every inch of the place for Bakkush. Dartley remembered how this man’s family had been brought to Cairo in crates, forcing his return. He intended telling the Egyptian that if he opened his mouth against him at this reception, his children—Dartley couldn’t remember how many the man had—would die lingering painful deaths, aware that their father’s words had brought this suffering upon them.
Dartley was the kind of man who could put a lot of feeling and authenticity in a message like that, because mostly he meant exactly what he said. People looked into his cold, steady eyes and they believed wh
at he was telling them.
He found Bakkush hiding behind three tall men. Before the Egyptian had a chance to disappear again, Dartley strode down on him with a killer smile and grasped his right hand in a firm handshake. Dartley squeezed until he felt the hand bones crackle in his grip and the Egyptian uttered a small, high-pitched yelp. He released the scientist’s hand, but before he could describe how the man’s children would have boiling water poured on them and be skinned alive, Bakkush whispered fiercely to him, clutching his damaged hand, “You’re wasting your time! Leave things to me!”
Dartley shook his head slowly.
“Very well. I think I know what you will try to do here. I will help in any way I can. Again, I no longer think it necessary in the short term.” He spoke quickly and precisely—a man with a disciplined mind but a little bewildered at the prospect of immediate action. “There is no urgency for you because of the destroyed reactor. For me, yes. Ahmed has to go. What do you want me to do?”
Dartley was alarmed by the physicist’s behavior now, for the opposite reason that he had been minutes ago. Before he had been worried that the man would turn him in. Now he was apprehensive about the Egyptian’s enthusiasm to get rid of Ahmed Hasan! A gung-ho amateur’s self-confidence could be more deadly to his partner than their adversary’s best weapons.