by Judith Gould
* * *
Daliah was filled with a thousand terrors, too much in a state of shock to be more than numbly aware that they were still at the airport, driving in inconspicuous leisure around to the cargo terminals at the far end. She felt engulfed by a heightened sense of unreality, and two hitherto foreign emotions held her in their ugly grip. She felt dominated. Totally dominated and exceedingly demoralized. She didn't have to look down to see if the revolver barrels were still aimed at her sides; she could feel them digging through her clothes, pressing into her flesh. She was terrified that the sudden jolt of a pothole, or an abrupt stop, or even her own acute trembling would accidentally cause one of the men to squeeze the trigger. She didn't dare try to escape, at least not while the guns were pressing into her sides. These men seemed to have no compunctions. They were inhuman, and would kill her on the spot and think nothing of it.
The car passed some chain-link gates and then slowed as it headed into the gaping maw of a dark, deserted hangar. It was like going from day into night. For a moment she could not see, and the terror was overwhelming. When the car came to a stop, the driver clicked on the overhead light. Even then she felt no relief.
The driver turned around, and when she saw what was in his hand, she sucked in her breath. It was a hypodermic syringe, and his thumb depressed the plunger, releasing a thin arc of clear liquid.
Eyes wide, she tried to squirm further back in her seat, but it was futile. There was no getting away from it. Not with guns pressing into her flesh. Abruptly the driver reached out, grabbed one of her arms, and yanked it forward.
'Wh-what are you doing?' she whispered. Her lips and throat were so dry from fear that her voice came out a croak.
He held the needle poised in the crook of her elbow. 'Pleasant dreams, actress,' he said with an ugly sneer, and at that moment, without bothering to roll up her sleeve or dab her arm with alcohol, he stabbed the needle deep into her flesh.
It stung sharply, and she let out a scream. Then she could feel a sleepy sensation streaming into her arm and spreading outward through her body. Suddenly everything seemed to slow down and become fuzzy. She was vaguely aware of the car doors opening ... of slumping forward and being tugged outside. Her legs were too limp to support her, and the men had to hold her up.
'I worry about you all the time,' Inge's voice echoed somewhere in the back of her mind, and that was her last thought. Then her expression slackened and her eyelids drooped shut. The world blurred and went black.
Najib al-Ameer's study on the top floor of the Trump Tower was book-lined and exceedingly luxurious.
Armless suede couches, signed tan-leather-covered French chairs, tole lamps, and a lacquered bronze-embellished desk made by maître Philippe-Claude Montigny for Louis XV himself could barely hold their own among the tortoiseshell-finished bookcases lined in brass and the warmth of books, books, and more books.
But there was more to this library than mere beautifully bound books and shelves upon shelves of first editions. Huge shallow drawers held a king's ransom of ancient Persian script fragments, sheafs of historical documents and treaties signed by kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers, three-thousand-year-old Egyptian papyri, seventeen-thousand-year-old painted rock fragments plundered from a cave in Lascaux, France, and the world's largest private collection of ancient maritime maps. The jewels of Najib al-Ameer's priceless treasures were Christian: the first a Gutenberg Bible, the second a complete illuminated manuscript of the Book of Hours from the fourteenth century.
As the moment, Najib, who usually found solace, peace, and immense joy in this, his sanctum, was finding that for once even his precious study could not divert either his gloom or his feeling of impending doom. The instant the telephone shrilled, he pounced on it, by habit activating the scrambler before the caller had a chance to speak.
'It is done,' a distorted voice told him over the rushing static in Arabic. 'The product is in our hands.'
Najib's hand began shaking so hard that the receiver knocked against his ear. After three decades of waiting patiently for this moment, the reality of the situation suddenly left him feeling stupefied: weak and depleted. For a moment he found it difficult to speak.
'Are you there?' the voice asked after a long pause.
He pulled himself together. 'Yes, I am still here. Did everything go smoothly?'
'Like clockwork. Shall we deliver the product to the destination agreed upon?'
'Yes,' Najib replied. 'I will be awaiting delivery.'
Slowly he lowered the receiver and let it drop back in its cradle. Then, loath to taint his sanctum with his gloom, he went out into the adjoining reading room and stared out the wall of tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. The sky looked phlegmy; it was one of those hot, muggy grey days, a preview of the oppressive summer to come, and the grey glass only made everything look muggier and more polluted than it really was. For a moment his mind pictured the Mideastern desert, so clear, so pure, so unspoiled. So clean and dry, with rippled mountains of sandy dunes, lengthening purple shadows, and blast-furnace heat.
Hands clasped behind his back, he paced, once again wondering whether it was all worth it ... or whether it wouldn't have been better to just forget about the past and let it be.
But Abdullah wouldn't let it go, had let him know as much in no uncertain terms.
His hands still shaking, Najib picked up the telephone receiver and punched a number. Newark answered almost immediately.
His voice was resigned. 'Prepare the plane for takeoff,' he said in English. 'No, not the Lear. The 727. You'll have to file an overseas flight plan.' When he hung up, he went to get his two briefcases, one filled with work, the other with travel documents and more work. Everything else he might need, including a complete change of wardrobe, was on the plane.
The Bell Jet Ranger helicopter with Daliah aboard finally received control-tower clearance and rose shakily up into the air. It nosed swiftly higher, higher, into the bright, cloudless blue of the sky, and then headed due east, over Samaria, then straight south along the Jordan River to Jericho.
Trust the Israelis, Khalid was thinking with a smirk. Smuggling the actress into Jordan would be easy enough. She would simply go over the Allenby Bridge in a truckload of fruit or vegetables bound for Amman. Even during the Yom Kippur War, this economic link held up; despite the fighting, West Bank fruits and vegetables kept being trucked over.
He grinned. Those Jews would never learn.
Chapter 8
When Daliah came to, her first thought was that she was being cremated alive. Then came the realization that she had been trussed. She raised her head and tried to move her arms, but that wasn't possible because her wrists had been securely tied behind her back. For a moment she struggled to free herself, but the cleverly tied knot was out of reach, and the more she struggled, the more she caused the bond to dig into her flesh and chafe her skin. If she continued this for much longer, she'd succeed only in rubbing her wrists raw.
With a grunt, she let her head slump back. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to deal rationally with the situation. But thoughts came sluggishly, and it was difficult to hold on to them for long. Between the narcotic still in her system and the debilitating heat, she felt impotent.
The heat was the worst. It was unbearable: oppressive, deadening. Her lungs burned from it and her skin prickled with a heat rash; it was so hot that it was impossible for her to take one really full, deep breath. All she was capable of were short, shallow gasps of stifling air, and the lack of a refreshing lungful brought on the beginnings of galloping panic.
She fought to regain control of herself. Giving in to panic, she warned herself, would only make everything that much worse. She knew she should be grateful for just being alive.
Then she became aware of her thirst. It was a thirst without dimension. There didn't seem to be an ounce of moisture anywhere in her body; every square inch of her flesh felt squeezed dry and hydrogenized. I've been freeze-dried! She
opened her mouth to laugh like a lunatic, but her throat was so dry not a sound could be voiced.
She knew then that unless she got hold of herself she was going to go certifiably mad. Slowly a burgeoning anger rose within her and kept the impending madness at bay. It was still within sight, still temptingly close but for the time being she'd managed to shove it away.
I have to keep my anger fed. Only that way can I stoke my will to live, and hope to survive. Think, dammit. Think!
She raised her head again, this time taking stock of her surroundings. She had been lying on her side, and the hard ground beneath her was spread with a heavy, scratchy, dirt-encrusted black goat-hair cloth. Grit was everywhere. Sandy grit. She could feel it in her nose, taste its crunch in her mouth. She could feel it, scratchy and abrasive, beneath her.
She was alone inside a stuffy black tent. A mere cloth prison, but an effective one. She also realized that she was stark naked. Well, there was nothing she could do about that. If they had done that to humiliate her, then they had another think coming. She almost had to smile. Here they had miscalculated. She found nothing humiliating about being nude. She had been raised to be proud of her body, and whether it was sunbathing nude on the beaches of St. Tropez or being filmed in the nude for all the world to see, she found it natural and was not in the least bit inhibited.
Another tiny victory won. But her satisfaction was short-lived, for gradually she became aware of her heartbeat. It seemed to be getting louder and louder all the time, until it throbbed so noisily she became frightened. Then she understood. It was the silence—the kind of intense, awesome silence one can find only in the middle of the desert at high noon. A silence so powerful and penetrating, so all-enveloping, that it was like an awesome physical presence.
She had been dumped in the middle of nowhere and left to die!
A new thought flashed out of nowhere: Where there was a tent, there had to be people! Perhaps if she called for help . . .
She swallowed several times to lubricate her throat, and then she began to yell for help. She yelled 'Help' in English and Hebrew and Arabic so often and so loud that her ears began to ring with her cries. Even after she fell quiet, she had the sensation that the air still echoed with her voice.
She held her breath and listened carefully above the thump-thump . . . thump-thump of her heartbeat for a response. But there was none, and her hope evaporated as swiftly as the moisture had seeped from her body. She'd succeeded only in straining her vocal cords and working herself up to an even greater thirst.
Water. She had always loved water. She had taken glassfuls and tubfuls and poolfuls for granted, had soaked in it, luxuriated in it, and loved it so much she half-believed herself to be a Pisces changeling. But now there suddenly was no water, not a single drop, and the stratospheric temperature seemed to climb higher and higher. Water. Water. She was almost delirious with her need for it.
In a sudden flash of enlightenment it hit her.
If there wasn't any real water, perhaps she could slake the worst of her immediate thirst with imaginary water. After all, wasn't she an accomplished actress? Couldn't she imagine almost anything, and actually believe it for a while? If she could pretend a three-sided set was a real place, an actor a real character, and a gun loaded with blanks capable of killing, why couldn't she do that now with water? Why couldn't she ease the worst of her thirst by acting as if it were there?
She shut her eyes, conjuring up a dripping tap, and then lavishly sprinklered lawns, cool foggy morning mists, refreshing drizzles, and violent rainstorms. She imagined pools, lakes, oceans and oceans of glorious, cool, clear water.
And then, imagining her trussed arms were free, she raised them gracefully above her head and dived neatly as the dancing smoothie holding his umbrella aloft sang 'Singin' in the Rain'.
Before she hit the water, she plunged into the safe, welcoming blankness that was sleep.
Chapter 9
At four thousand feet, the pilot rolled the 727-100 gently to port and then banked the plane in a wide sweeping curve. Najib was seated in the living-room section on a leather couch specially fitted with seat belts. In anticipation for landing, he had changed from his Western clothes into the traditional Arab robes and headgear, and he was staring unseeingly out the little square window at the tilting desert below.
It was the Rub' al-Khali, the 'Empty Quarter' in the Saudi Arabian southeast, and its name fitted it perfectly. All there was, as far as the eye could see, was desolate wilderness. Alternately golden sand and dung-coloured rocks, it was a place where nothing grew and where it never rained, where, aside from a sprinkling of oil wells and refineries, there was nothing, and the only signs of life were the aeroplanes flying high in the sky and very rarely a tribe of bedouins crossing the desert on their camels, heading to or from Mecca the same way their forebears and their forebears' forebears had crossed it before them. It was a cruel wilderness, harsh and unforgiving, and was avoided by all but the most foolhardy and the bedouins who knew how to survive it.
A stewardess in a red St. Laurent shift came soundlessly up behind him. 'We're coming in for the final approach now, Mr. al-Ameer,' she said in a breathy little voice.
He looked up at her and nodded. She was one of the two handpicked stewardesses: Elke, the blonde Austrian Valkyrie who, except for her too-large bosom, looked like she had just stepped straight off the cover of Vogue.
She leaned closer, enveloping him in a heady cloud of perfume and musk. Her smooth, manicured fingers reached for his seat belt and clicked it together around his waist, her clever fingertips grazing his groin. Her pale grey eyes held his gaze. 'Will we be stopping over, or are you planning to send us back, Mr. al-Ameer?' she asked huskily.
He looked surprised. 'Captain Childs has forgotten his instructions?'
She shook her head, her eyes lowering obviously to his groin and then back up again. 'I would like to know,' she said, her voice heavy with promises.
He gave a rueful little smile. 'I'm afraid I will be staying on alone. The plane is returning to Newark right away.'
'Oh. I see.' She tried to hide her disappointment and moved away.
He turned back to the window and stared out. At first, all he could see was desert, desert, and more desert. And then suddenly, like a mirage, there was the palace, sliding into view a few miles ahead. It was a huge sprawling modern building built on a manmade hill, and looked like a cross between a terminal at Kennedy Airport and a flying saucer. Massive concrete buttresses crisscrossed in arcs above it, giving the illusion that the palace was actually suspended from them. The entire perimeter of the eight-acre compound was surrounded by thick protective walls, inside of which were also some scattered outbuildings with satellite dishes and revolving radar antennae on their rooftops, lush emerald-green lawns, clay tennis courts, a sparkling turquoise swimming pool, and two tall water towers disguised as postmodern minarets.
He looked straight down as they flew over it. He could see armed guards patrolling the grounds, the rooftops, and the walks atop the walls. At the moment, their attention was on the plane; they all had their faces upturned. He smiled twistedly to himself. He could tell from their paramilitary green field uniforms and white Arab headcloths that they were Abdullah's men. Then his eye caught the distant flash of silver. Twin gleaming lifelines, one a pipeline for fuel, the other for water, stretched from the house for one hundred and eighty miles to the desalinization plant on the coast. And beyond the far side of the compound, the private airstrip was a shimmering water mirage, a ribbon of concrete writhing amid the sands. A small Cessna and a twin-engine Beechcraft were parked at the far end. A windsock hung limply.
It certainly looked as though the Almoayyed brothers had built themselves the ultimate hideaway, even if every pound of soil had had to be flown in and every fluid ounce of water pumped across the desert. Abdullah, requiring all the secrecy and privacy he could get his hands on, had been wise in borrowing it from them. With its sophisticated communications s
ystems, state-of-the-art electronics, and the remotest of remote locations, its nearest neighbour eighty miles away, the Almoayyed palace was a formidable fortress, and virtually impregnable. One could come and go and do whatever one wished without anyone knowing about it. But he wondered idly, as he often did when it came to the palatial homes of Arab millionaires, sheiks, and oil ministers, why, when money was no object, they insisted upon buildings which looked and felt, inside and out, like expensive modern public terminals or high-rise hotel lobbies.
That thought slid out of his mind as the palace slid out of view. The fuselage shuddered as the landing gear lowered and locked into place. The desert seemed to rise to meet the plane. Then the golden sands rushed past in a blur and the plane touched down smoothly, the engines whined in reverse, and the instant the captain applied the brakes, Najib felt himself thrust backward in the couch. Even before the plane taxied completely to a halt, he could already see the boarding ramp being towed forward by a tractor, and an elongated shocking-pink Daimler limousine with black-tinted windows coming behind it.
He unhooked the seat belt, got up, and walked forward. Elke was already pushing the door open to oppressive heat.
The pilot ducked his head out from the cockpit. 'You still want us to take off and leave you here, Mr. al-Ameer?'
Najib nodded. 'I do, Captain Childs. Take the plane back to Newark and wait there for further instructions. I'll let you know when to pick me up. You can refuel in Riyadh.'
'Will do, Mr. al-Ameer.' The pilot gave a casual half-salute. 'Hope you enjoyed your flight.'