by Warren Adler
“Then they should realize this.”
The fact was, Harkins saw, there were no options. Compromise was not in the man’s vocabulary.
“Without veto power on your suggestions, how can I be a President?” the President asked.
“I am a man who always welcomes suggestions,” the Padre said.
“Can’t ask for anything more than that,” Amy said sarcastically. They paid no attention to her outburst. “Macho men,” she said with contempt
Harkins’ mind was already heading in other directions. He was excited. He knew he was absolutely central to any idea the Padre might have. Finally, he would be able to fully utilize the full power of the CIA machinery.
The President bit his lip and tapped his fingers on the table.
“Suppose they don’t let me continue in office?” he asked.
“You must convince them.”
“A man goes to these lengths . . .” Harkins began.
“No need to explain, Mr. Interlocutor,” the President said to Harkins.
After a long pause, he turned to the Padre. “Can you put the plug in this way or do I have to bend over?”
20
ROBERT MICHAELS SAT in the misty pungency of Mrs. Santorelli’s kitchen watching the portly woman stir pasta sauce with a wooden spoon. She shuffled around in worn slippers, offering benign smiles when she looked at him, winking at him as she tasted the sauce from her wooden spoon.
Because of the heat, he had stripped down to his T-shirt. Yet he had chosen to sit in the kitchen rather than the cooler living room because he did not want to be alone. Not that he and Mrs. Santorelli had much to say to each other. Her frame of reference was only that of her dead husband, the sainted Giovanni, and almost no sentence escaped her mouth without a reference to what her Giovanni used to say.
When he was not watching Mrs. Santorelli’s movements in front of her old-fashioned gas range, his eyes drifted to the black and white television set on her Formica kitchen table. From where he sat, he could also see Angelo, the Pencil, sitting at the dining-room table speaking softly into the black telephone. The heat did not faze him. In fact, little fazed him. He seemed to be a man wearing blinders, his eyes wandering only as far as his little notes, which he consulted periodically, after which he dialed a number and whispered into the phone.
Agitation and frustration had given way to helplessness. He felt childlike, half-made, ravaged by the triple demons of guilt, uncertainty, and depression.
“Not to worry,” Angelo had assured him.
It was only when he heard the first announcement on television that the enormity of the act blasted into his consciousness. To hear it in this manner, stark and blatant, shattered his hopes.
“Madness,” he said aloud. Angelo had looked at him and frowned. It was a conclusion he had not allowed himself to make during the planning stages. Salvatore had made it seem so simple, so logical. We will take the President hostage and not give him up until Maria and Joey are released. An eye for an eye.
Now he blamed himself for encouraging it to happen. Not that he could have stopped the vaunted Padre from doing anything.
“They will surely kill them now,” he sighed. By then, Angelo merely ignored him. Robert knew why. There was no role for a Cassandra in the organization. Not now or ever. They were simply geared to believe that they could perform the impossible.
Mrs. Santorelli began to slap meat into meatballs, clapping her hands around the little globs of beef as if she were cheering the tenor in some Verdi opera. It was such an incongruous sight, he could not, despite his gloom, keep himself from smiling.
At that moment Rocco burst in the door. He was out of breath, sweating from walking two flights. He grunted in Robert’s direction, passing him to where Angelo was sitting in the dining room. Robert listened as the men spoke in low tones.
“The Pole,” Rocco, the Talker, said.
“Again,” Angelo said. “We trashed his trucks.”
“He still makes trouble.”
“It was not enough of a message,” the Pencil said.
“No.”
“Not a warning this time,” the Pencil said. “He has made his bed.”
The Talker nodded. The Pencil made a note.
“Something to do with Salvatore?” Robert asked. He knew better, but needed to ask the question.
“Just business,” the Pencil said. The Talker grunted.
“You’re going to have a man killed, aren’t you?”
They both looked at him, ignoring his question.
“Considering what we’re involved with now—” Robert pointed to the television set “—how can you, it boggles the mind.”
“It is business, Robert,” Rocco said in a gravelly voice.
“It is the Padre’s orders,” the Pencil said, “to conduct business.”
Robert did not expect an answer. He felt imprisoned in a value system that he could never really understand.
Rocco moved into the kitchen. Mrs. Santorelli looked up and nodded a greeting.
“You want some, Rocco?” she asked.
“Later,” he said. His expression was dark and gloomy. For a moment he looked at the television set.
“It was a stupid idea,” Robert said testily.
Rocco glowered at the television, then left.
Luigi came into the apartment without knocking. He looked agitated. His face was red and he, too, was sweating.
“They know. The FBI is everywhere, even in the restaurant.”
“Did you think it would be a secret?” Robert said sarcastically.
“But the Padre is inside the White House,” Luigi said, after he had cooled down. “Right in the bonanz. You’ll see, they will succeed.” He looked at Robert, then bent over and patted his hand. “Your Maria and Joey will be coming home soon.”
“Blind faith,” Robert said. Inside himself, he was churning. Did he feel pride in his father-in-law’s incredible achievement? It was awesome, beyond madness.
Mrs. Santorelli slid the meatballs from a wooden board into a pot of boiling water. Something in the act panicked him, as if she were throwing bits of Maria and Joey into the pot. He imagined their pain and felt it himself.
“Those people are animals,” Luigi said, watching the television screen. They saw images of the dead after a recent airport terrorist attack.
Mrs. Santorelli muttered something in Italian.
“What did she say?” Robert asked Luigi.
“‘Without a heart, they will lose every time.’ An old Italian saying.”
Considering what he had heard earlier, he did not savor the irony.
“We are all flesh and blood,” he whispered. It was then that the idea occurred to him. With the all-seeing media eye focused on the issue of hostage-taking, perhaps the time had come for another bold step. He would get on television. Surely he would be a commodity of news value, the son-in-law of the man who held the President hostage. He would make an appeal, let the world see a husband and father’s anguish. Appeal to the hostage-takers, to his father-in-law, to the world. He would certainly have their attention.
Suddenly his interest was drawn back to the television set. The commentator was making an announcement: “Another American hostage has been murdered.”
“Oh my God,” Robert shouted.
“We have been provided with these tapes, distributed by the group calling itself the Islamic Jihad,” the commentator continued. “They are not for the squeamish.”
Mrs. Santorelli turned from her pots. The Pencil came in from the living room to watch the television set.
On the screen was a man sitting on a chair in a barren room, his face bearded, his eyes glazed and fearful. Beside were two smiling young men waving weapons. Suddenly they leveled their guns and took aim at the man’s body. There was a burst of silent gunfire. The man’s body bounced in a macabre St. Vitus dance. Then, bloody and riddled with bullets, the body slumped to the floor in a gruesome closeup.
Robert ran to
the bathroom, knelt beside the toilet, and vomited.
21
“AN ELABORATE TRICK,” the young man said, his face pink with little puddles of natural red flush on either cheek. Ahmed watched him with pleasure, thinking how well he had absorbed the lesson. Trust few people. Trust only actions. Never words. He patted the boy’s blond hair, the texture soft and fluffy to his touch. An aberration in the genetic pool, a blond Arab, product of some horny Crusader who had poked his way eastward in the name of Christ, spoils, and pleasure.
“You think so?” Ahmed said, pouring another spill of scotch into the tumbler and lifting it to the light of the single naked bulb. Then he tipped the tumbler in the direction of the boy, who stood posing against the wall in his tailored camouflage greens, a delicate hand poised on a polished leather holster. My toy soldier, Ahmed thought, upending the drink as he watched the flickering image on the television screen.
“They want us to think that,” the boy said, encouraged by Ahmed’s air of approval. Ahmed smiled and poured again. He knew that the news was true. By way of celebration, he told himself. At first the news had stunned him. Then it had recalled to him an emotion he had not observed in himself for years. Fear. Not a simple fear of death, but of immensity.
Less than a half hour had passed since the news had flashed over Beirut radio. It played constantly, plugging him into the outside world. Prior to this new announcement, the killing of an American hostage had been the only news of importance. Everything else had been repetitive. The killing had annoyed him. It had removed him momentarily from center stage.
He had been listening with half an ear, his mind concentrating on the process of inveiglement. He had planned to seduce the boy as a diversion, had set him up for this moment, had plotted, as always when an innocent was about to be initiated. Then this new announcement had exploded into his consciousness, emptying him of desire.
Three quick shots of scotch steadied him. Yet he did not wish the boy to see his uncertainty. Worse, he suddenly did not trust the boy or any of the others whom he had spotted about the building. The legitimate dwellers had long since fled.
The woman and her son had been placed in an apartment on the third floor of a building in West Beirut. Men from his group lived above and below the apartment. Others inhabited adjacent apartments, one of which he used for himself.
He had organized everything in shifts, food preparation, guard duty, time off. He had also devised a pattern to the captivity. Every few days they would move to another building. Sometimes it would be for only a few hours. The object was to keep moving in a pattern much like a child’s drawing in which lines were drawn in numbered sequence.
Most of the gunmen he chose from among the militias were very young. Some, like the boy who stood before him, were barely sixteen. Through the clever use of myth, ritual, and mystery, he had found that the youngest were the easiest to manipulate. Thus, he could easily take full advantage of the fanaticism that had been built into these boys from earliest memory. Boys of this age had no concept of death and dying. They yearned for martyrdom, assured by some crazy mullahs that death was merely an unpleasant interlude between pain and paradise.
He had, of course, been ridiculed for his bungling of this last caper. A woman and a child. Of no value. They wanted this Assistant Secretary of State from America and would pay for none other. Even the Arab press had demeaned him. But when they discovered the real value of this currency, he would be catapulted to fame.
The value of the woman and the child had increased a million-fold. He had in his possession one of the great political prizes of all time. A mere exchange of prisoners was hardly fitting for such a prize.
“We must leave in a few hours,” he told the boy.
“Because of that?” The boy moved his head in the direction of the television. A short time ago, Ahmed might have permitted the intimacy of truth.
“No,” he lied.
“It is a trick. I’m sure of it,” the boy said.
Ahmed smiled and patted the boy’s head. He wrote down the address of the apartment building he had chosen, a damaged structure a mile away.
“You will reconnoiter and set up a new place.”
“Yes, Ahmed.”
Ahmed embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, his usual gesture of soldierly camaraderie, a subtle step removed from a more intimate embrace.
When he had gone, Ahmed stepped into the corridor, where one of his men snapped his AK47 into firing position, then slowly shifted the muzzle. It had been his own instructions. Trust no one. The axiom of his trade.
He carried the portable television set with him to the apartment where he kept the woman and the boy. He stepped inside and relocked it from the inside, a precautionary step he might not have taken previously. His weight made the barren wooden floor creak as he moved farther inside, listening for the telltale signs of the chain links.
The apartment consisted of two rooms as well as a tiny kitchen and a bathroom. The windows had been tightly boarded from both the exterior and interior wall, with tiny holes for ventilation. The woman and the boy were chained by the ankle to a pipe, with the links long enough to permit them to reach their sleeping bags.
Compared to how it had been in Egypt, it was a comparatively benign imprisonment. He had made sure the food was nourishing, and access to the bathroom was allowed for a minimum of personal hygiene. The rooms were barren. He did not trust beds or furniture. Pieces could be pulled apart and used as weapons. He put the television set on the floor.
“Who is it?”
The woman’s panicked voice came from the corner where the sleeping bags had been placed.
“Mommy?”
“Only an old friend,” Ahmed said.
His English had come from two years of high school and American television programs. He had established, he believed, a workable system of communication with the woman. Like all women, she was irascible and sarcastic, and, of course, her disposition was not improved by her situation. The child he had bribed with candies and comic books.
There was no point in holding back the news. In fact, he was anxious to impart it. They were now colleagues of a sort, certainly co-conspirators. He chuckled at the thought. American Mafiosa. The idea of it had the ring of comedy.
He flicked the light switch. A bare bulb of weak wattage lit the room. The woman stirred in the sleeping bag and sat up rubbing her eyes. The boy opened his eyes and looked fearfully at Ahmed.
“It’s all right, sweets,” the woman said soothingly. “Go back to sleep.”
The boy looked at her tentatively, then, reassured, closed his eyes again.
Ahmed squatted down and settled himself cross-legged beside the woman, an uncommon gesture for him. The woman looked at him curiously.
“I have news,” he murmured, smiling.
“You’re letting us go?” the woman asked expectantly.
“Depends,” Ahmed replied, “on how your father handles the situation.”
“My father!” She unzipped the sleeping bag and sprang upward like a missile released. She was sleeping in a man’s shirt, which served as a kind of nightgown.
“You’ve been a naughty girl,” Ahmed said, waving a finger at her. “Not telling me whose daughter you were.”
“It was none of your business.”
“I could have saved the lives of my men, plucked you right off the parking lot of the Egyptian Museum. You, my dear, are the real prize.”
“All right, so you know,” she said. She moved around the room on her bare feet, as far as the chain would take her. Then she turned suddenly. “Most men in your position would be paralyzed with fright. My father is not a forgiving man when it comes to his family.”
“So the world has discovered,” he said with a wry chuckle.
Her face expressed puzzlement. He debated keeping her in suspense, then decided to plunge forward.
“He has taken the President of the United States hostage.”
“My father?”
>
“The Padre himself.”
She shook her head in disbelief. A hysterical giggling sound bubbled up from her chest.
“Oh Jesus,” she cried.
“He has him in the White House. Along with the President’s wife.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“You are welcome to see for yourself.” He stood up and plugged in the television set. It warmed slowly, then burst into light. He waited while she absorbed the confirmation. It was clear in any language. The hostage-taking of the President was the dominant theme of all the channels he flipped through.
She paced the room as far as the chain allowed, then moved back to where he was squatting, towering over him. His eyes met hers. “You want to hear something funny? I kept saying to myself, he finds out, there’ll be hell to pay. Now I’ll tell you something funnier. I don’t think I’m as surprised as I should be.”
Ahmed laughed, a belly laugh, which grew in great waves until his eyes began to glisten. The boy sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“It’s all right, sweets,” the woman said, bending over him and kissing him on the forehead. He slipped lower down in the sleeping bag and she kissed him again on both cheeks.
“He must love you very much,” Ahmed said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.
“Not half as much as he must hate you,” the woman snapped.
“Does he seriously believe that you and the child are worth the price of the President himself?”
“You don’t know my father.”
“Perhaps I will meet him someday.”
“Oh, you’ll meet him. One way or another. If I were you, I wouldn’t be making any long-term plans.”
Despite himself, Ahmed felt a brief tremor of fear, which rattled him for a moment and left him suddenly angry. It passed quickly. What he must do is consider all aspects of the situation, especially the political realities within the Arab world. As always, they would fight among themselves. Some would see it in its true light, as a major victory, rejoicing, urging more blood, hoping that the President would be blown away. Some would see it as a standard to be matched, perhaps upstaged.