by Ian Barclay
Ahmed Hasan strode into the room with his body-guards. Awad bowed. Omar saw this and bowed even lower, pale now and starting to sweat.
“Honored president,” Awad said, “this is the one man who can positively identify the American dog who drags his filthy carcass over the pure world of Islam.”
Ahmed Hasan looked at the nervous, sweating Omar critically. “The Frenchman Jacques Laforque recognized him when it mattered. Why do I have, to depend on a foreigner to alert me? Where has this Egyptian been until now?”
“He has been working with me,” Awad said, “and with my partner, who as you know sacrificed his life for your excellency.”
Hasan bowed his head in respect for the dead. “He will not be forgotten.”
Everyone there knew Hasan could not remember Zaid’s name.
Awad pointed proudly to Omar. “This man is not a foreigner. He is an Arab. An Egyptian. A Sunni Moslem. A patriot and a believer you can depend on, not some whore from Paris like Laforque.”
Ahmed Hasan looked from Awad to Omar and back again with an amused look. He said to Omar, “I have heard of your activities. You should be careful not to disappoint Awad, now that he has placed his trust in you. Like me, Awad is a hard taskmaster. He does not tolerate failure. How many days have you given him, Awad?”
“I had not presumed,” Awad answered with uncharacteristic meekness.
“Two days,” Hasan announced with finality.
“For what?” Omar asked, alarmed.
“To find the American dog,” Awad told him. “I will be with you every hour and every minute of your search. We will not sleep until we find him.”
“Two days,” the president repeated.
“You will have to try very hard, Omar,” Awad rasped. “Everyone here knows you for a cock-sucking asshole who does not deserve to live! We will let you fly to Beirut, Omar, and take your money with you if you give us this American. Before everybody here, you have my word on that.”
“You will have my protection and thanks,” Ahmed confirmed.
“But you only have two days,” Awad cautioned the terrified Omar. “You heard his excellency give you two days. He is being very generous to a known spy such as yourself, Omar.”
The only sound the sweating, trembling Omar was able to make was a small wheeze of protest.
“Spies!” Ahmed shouted, making Omar jump. “They infest Egypt! They must be rooted out!” He rushed to the door. “Guard! Guard!” A dozen armed soldiers gathered before him. “Bring me a spy.”
A sergeant stepped forward. “Who, sir?”
“What does it matter, soldier?” Ahmed shouted. “All spies are enemies of Egypt and Islam. Bring me a spy!”
They came back with a frightened, soft looking, middle-aged man who might once have been a prosperous businessman. The sergeant trussed the man’s thumbs behind his back, pushed him into the room and shouted after him, “Kneel before our glorious president, defender of the Light of Islam.”
The prisoner staggered to Hasan, dropped to his knees, and bowed his head.
Ahmed Hasan turned to Omar Zekri. “You see? That was not low enough. Kick him.”
“Me?” Omar asked.
Awad shoved him. “Your president has ordered you, stupid dog.”
Omar waddled over to the kneeling prisoner, who was now bowing desperately so that his forehead touched the floorboards. Omar kicked him gently on the thigh.
“Not gently!” Ahmed Hasan bellowed. “Hard! Like this!” He kicked the cringing Omar on the leg, and the chubby man squealed and nearly lost his balance.
But Omar got the message. He hauled off with a good boot into the bowing prisoner’s side, which made the man crumple into a gasping knot of pain.
“Again!” Ahmed yelled. “Harder!”
Omar stood still and looked at him in mute appeal. When Hasan took a step toward him, Omar rushed to comply. He balanced on his left foot, drew back his right foot and kicked the prisoner with a mighty thump. Omar hopped about, holding his right ankle, which the kick had strained.
Ahmed smiled at this performance, walked over and kicked Omar on the rump. He pointed to the prisoner, now agonizedly trying to crawl away. Omar kicked him on the side of the head, which flipped the man on his back. Omar kicked the man again and he became unconscious.
“So you defy me?” Ahmed asked in an interested voice. “You try to cheat this spy from feeling his deserved punishment? Well, remember this, my friend: I will not let you slip away into unconsciousness to escape me if you don’t hand over this American to me.” He strode to the spread-eagled prisoner, contemptuously turned him over with one foot, then brought his heel down on the back of his neck and loudly snapped his backbone. He turned to Awad and pointed to Omar. “He has two days. No more.”
As the president made for the door with long strides, his bodyguards clustered around him.
Awad gave Omar a pitying look and sneered, “You keep this up, Omar, you’re doing just fine.”
Richard Dartley and Abdel Ibrahim walked out of the Southern Cemetery and kept going until they came to a cafe with a public phone. Dartley got through to the Hotel des Roses after the usual difficulties with a Cairo phone and asked for Jacques Laforque. The Frenchman’s voice came over the line a few minutes later.
“Monsieur?”
“Meet me in two hours where we met before,” Dartley said without identifying himself.
“D’accord.”
They took a taxi to the Hertz depot and Dartley gave Ibrahim money to hire a car. Ibrahim drove to a suq on Dartley’s instructions. There Dartley bought the carcass of a lamb and a sack of rice, which they loaded in the trunk. Nothing was said—it was simply understood that Dartley would not insult Ibrahim by offering him cash at this stage. The Egyptian was free to change his mind later when he came to understand that this was business with Dartley, not revenge or heroics.
They were an hour early for his meeting with Laforque, and they sat in the car parked a distance down the street. Dartley expected the worst. The Frenchman had betrayed him at the palace. Presumably, he would try again if given the opportunity. Laforque did not know Dartley had seen him at the palace reception. There had been no mention of the incident on the TV, radio or newspapers. A meeting like this would be an ideal way for Laforque to hand him on a plate to the authorities. Yet Laforque was a professional and so he would know that Dartley could not be easily lured into such a trap. Anyway, Dartley had no choice but to meet his “employer” to find out what was happening.
They saw Laforque arrive and enter the cafe. Dartley left the car and Ibrahim drove past the cafe, turned about and stopped outside the cafe on the way back. He beckoned to Laforque, who stood immediately and joined him in the front seat of the gray Opel. As Ibrahim returned to where Dartley stood, there were no suspicious movements of other cars or people that he could detect. When the Opel stopped, Dartley climbed into the backseat. He said nothing to Laforque and kept busy looking for patterns in the traffic behind them, such as one car turning off and being replaced by another. The chaos of Cairo traffic would have made any sophisticated tailing operation very difficult. When Dartley was sure they were not being followed, he told Ibrahim to drop them off at a crowded intersection.
When Laforque had gotten out, Dartley set up a meeting place with Ibrahim in two hours. He recalled the Egyptian’s often sketchy notion of time and tapped the man’s digital wristwatch. “Be there.”
“What do I do now?”
“You might take the lamb home before it starts to stink up the car during the hot part of the day.”
Laforque seemed content to walk.
“Anything new?” Dartley asked.
“Yes. Very important. We want to cancel your contract. Keep the money. Go home right away.”
Normally, Dartley would have shrugged and headed for the airport. He found himself saying, “Why?”
“High-level decision,” Laforque said.
“Just like that.”
Laforq
ue shrugged. “No reflection on your abilities.”
“Although I failed twice to achieve my goal?”
“Twice? Whatever you say. We’re very pleased things turned out this way.”
“I lost a man at Aqaba.”
“You recruited him, not me,” Laforque said. “That was bad luck. You don’t throw good luck after bad to try to even things out. You get to keep your money without completing the job. Don’t complain.”
“Michelle Perret, your contact at Aqaba, set me up. Why?”
“She works for the same people I do. It’s possible they gave her different orders behind my back. She doesn’t report to me.”
Dartley had to admire Laforque’s cool dismissal of his implied charges. They both knew that Laforque was low-level and could be just as much a victim of his Paris superiors as Dartley was meant to be.
“Why did you give the alert when you saw me at the presidential palace?”
“Me?”
“You told the bodyguards, then stood in a doorway.”
Laforque laughed. “I was certain you hadn’t seen me. Very well, I’ll tell you. As you know from all the screaming on the television and radio, the Israelis bombed Hasan’s nuclear reactor and set his program back by a couple of years. Now Hasan needs a new reactor worth a hundred million American dollars or so. France is about to sell it to him. I was at the palace to deliver some negotiation details from Paris before going out to search for you, when to my horror I saw you, no more than fifteen feet away from France’s suddenly most valuable customer, about to pull some lunatic ninja stunt. If Hasan goes, so does our contract. I did what I had to do to stop you,”
“And now?” Dartley inquired.
“I’ve been searching for you everywhere to tell you to go home. I could have put the bodyguards onto you at the palace, but I didn’t.”
“It’s also possible you guessed that I was within seconds of striking down Hasan, knew they couldn’t find me in time among all those Americans, and thought I’d never escape from the palace anyway.”
Laforque laughed scornfully. “If I sat down with you, we could theorize all sorts of explanations together. It’s always easy to do after the event, but when something is happening you never get a chance to think. You just act. Maybe I could have done things better. But look at how things are: Hasan is alive and will give France the contract. You’re alive and richer by a million dollars. Forget all this. Go home and spend it.”
Dartley grinned. “When you put it that way, it makes sense.”
Omar Zekri did not want Awad to find out about the Ibrahims. They were too valuable to Omar to lose. He funneled money from Pritchett at the American Embassy to them, keeping a hefty chunk of it for himself. The Ibrahim women and children picked up many of the information packets from his informants and could be trusted to pay them the agreed amounts—such honesty in Omar’s eyes being proof of their insane dedication to revenge. Where else would he ever find ragged urchins or fellahin women upon whom he could totally depend? He used their menfolk on missions which involved physical danger. And for all this, they charged him not one piastre, assuming that the money sent by Mubarak’s aides inside the American Embassy should be answered by their efforts.
Omar had taken a strong liking to one of the family’s teenage boys and talked with him and gave him cigarettes whenever he could. Omar had managed to rid himself for a few hours of Awad’s almost constant presence and used this time to contact the Ibrahims. The boy had let it slip. They had an American staying with them. An American living in a cabin in the City of the Dead! The Egyptian poor would not permit a hippie foreigner to do this. It had to be the one Omar still thought of as Thomas Lewis, the wheat expert.
If Awad knew this, he would have the Ibrahims detained and Omar would lose their valuable services. He had to find a way to feed the American to Awad without involving the Ibrahim clan. He could think of only one way. Having taken a notebook from his pocket and torn out a page, he printed a message in block letters: URGENT, SEE ME TODAY, OMAR Z.
He folded the paper and gave it to the Ibrahim boy along with a ten-pound note so he could buy himself cigarettes.
Then he rushed off to find Awad.
Abdel Ibrahim struck the youth with his fist on the mouth, splitting his lip. The teenager’s hangdog expression did not change, and he made no attempt to defend himself, either physically or verbally.
Abdel and Dartley walked away as Abdel said, “That one is no good. He is not my boy—I would beat him unconscious if he were. He’s my oldest brother’s son. He means no harm, but he is weak. The others will watch him while you are with us.”
“Let’s find Omar and see what this is all about,” Dartley said. Privately he thought it was some other change of mind which Laforque had to transmit to him, and the Frenchman had hired Omar to find him again.
Abdel knew Omar’s daily route even better than Dartley did. At this time of day he would be in Garden City, not far south of the American Embassy. The British had developed this part of the city as living quarters for themselves in the 1930s, and Garden City remained today as one of Cairo’s most pleasant areas.
Omar was standing by himself on a street corner. The intersection was broad, and Dartley motioned Abdel to pull in the car on the opposite side.
“Have him cross the street to us,” Dartley ordered, slipping beneath the steering wheel himself as Abdel got out.
Dartley watched Abdel wait for a break in the traffic, then hurriedly cross the street to Omar, who didn’t spot him until then. Abdel shook hands with Omar and tried to lead him by the arm back across the street. Omar balked. They argued.
It was then that Dartley grew nervous. He threw the car in gear and let it slide forward slowly along the street while he watched developments on the far side. Only after the car had moved more than twenty feet did he see a fat man with an open sports shirt hanging over his pants. The man stood back against the building wall, out of Ibrahim’s sight as he talked with Omar. Dartley would have bet the farm that the fat man had a pistol tucked somewhere in his straining waistband beneath the loose shirt. And Dartley had a damn good idea who the fat man was waiting for to approach Omar. Himself.
Ibrahim was going too far. The hungry looking man, who was just skin and bone, was punching the fat cowering Omar and forcing him to cross the street. Dartley cursed. This wasn’t what he wanted. He had no need to speak with Omar now. Omar had no message for him.
Abdel had forced Omar out into the traffic when the fat man pulled a pistol from beneath his shirt and went after them. Dartley accelerated the Opel at right angles across the traffic moving in both directions. The Cairo drivers, used to such unpredictable behavior, honked their horns, but didn’t slow down much as they swerved around him. Dartley stopped the car two-thirds of the way across the broad intersection. He leaped out, then reached behind the driver’s seat to Ibrahim’s shotgun on the floor.
Dartley’s maneuver with the car had distracted the fat man from shooting Abdel, but now he was lining up the gun barrel on Dartley’s head. Dartley pumped a shell into the chamber and loosed off a shot at the gunman, which did more damage to the vinyl on the roof of a passing car than it did to its intended target.
A bullet whistled past Dartley’s ear like a crazed hornet as he pumped another shell into the chamber. He snapped off the shot without taking aim. The fat gunman was peppered with birdshot, but it had spread out too much to cause him serious damage. All the same, the stinging impact of a dozen pieces of shot got across the message to him that his pistol was no match for a pump-action shotgun. The fat man turned and ran.
Dartley reloaded the chamber of the gun and aimed from the hip at Omar. Abdel Ibrahim’s eyes widened in alarm and he backed off fast to one side.
Dartley’s voice was easy, raised only loud enough to be heard above the honking horns of the traffic which the shooting had backed up. “Omar, I guess you never heard the good advice to never be the bait in your own trap.”
He loose
d off a blast from the gun which caught Omar in the chest, knocking him over like a soda bottle. He sat up in the roadway, an unrecognizable pulp of blood, hair and gristle. Dartley sent a second load of shot into his half-butchered carcass.
This time the bloodied torso fell back and lay still.
People were screaming, shouting and running from the shots between the cars.
Dartley gestured to Ibrahim with the smoking barrel of the gun. “You drive.”
Chapter
13
The elevator was not working in the Adli Street apartment building, which although new was already run down. Richard Dartley and Abdel Ibrahim climbed a staircase to the seventh floor, where the Pensione Cornwall was located. Other people in the stairwell gave them no more than a passing glance.
Inside the pensione, which seemed clean and well cared for, there was no one at the reception desk. Dartley hammered on the formica top with his knuckles.
An Egyptian in shirtsleeves, about thirty, came out and looked over the unshaven American and his emaciated sidekick from the City of the Dead. “Sorry, we have no rooms left.”
Dartley held out his half of the $100 bill the arms dealer had ripped in a jagged tear across the middle.
The man in shirtsleeves showed no surprise. He took the bill and disappeared back into the pensione. While he was gone, Dartley slowly lifted the phone receiver on the reception desk. There was a dial tone. He put it back.
“He might have another line,” Dartley suggested.
Ibrahim shook his head.
In a minute the man returned with the two leather suitcases Dartley had last seen in the trunk of the arms dealer’s green Mercedes in the underground garage. He decided not to check the contents. Even if everything was gone, replaced by bricks or rocks, he did not want a confrontation on the seventh floor of an apartment building with no working elevator in the New City.